I am a 6th year PhD. student working with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett in the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Boston College and Massachusetts General Hospital. I am broadly interested in the psychological and neural basis of human emotion - or to rip off William James, in answering the question "what is an emotion?"

My on-going lines of research are united by the hypothesis that emotions are mental states constructed of more fundamental psychological ingredients. In this view, a person "has" an emotion when a basic affective state is made meaningful using knowledge about emotion. I am interested in how these ingredients interact during the experience and perception of emotions and in how they are represented as broad-scale networks in the brain. My other research interests include questions about the embodied representation of emotion knowledge, individual and sex differences in emotional experience, the role of attentional focus in emotion experience, and how, more generally, the mind can be mapped to the brain.

• BC Psychology Department
• Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
• IAS Lab
• email Kristen