OUR RESEARCHERS
Kristen Lindquist
Professor of Psychology | Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Endowed Chair in Social Psychology
Kristen is a psychologist and neuroscientist who studies one of the oldest questions about human nature: what is an emotion?
KRISTEN’S RESEARCH
How does the brain build emotions?
Kristen's research overturns the popular idea that emotions are hardwired reflexes housed in specific parts of the brain. Her work shows that the brain builds emotions in the moment, drawing on signals from the body, the words and concepts we learn from our culture, and the situations we're in.
It's why a growling stomach can turn into anger (being "hangry") and why a word like "love" means different things in different languages. These insights have implications for mental health, aging, and how young people navigate their social worlds.
SCIENCE IN EVERYDAY LIFE
Putting your feelings into words
Explore how naming your emotions can help us understand and manage what we feel.
Background & Recognition
Kristen directs The Affective Science Lab at The Ohio State University. Her research has been published in Science, cited more than 20,000 times, and funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. It has been featured in Time, Newsweek, Scientific American, Smithsonian, and she has discussed the science of emotion on Big Think and numerous podcasts. She has devised AI start-ups, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and Sesame Workshop.
Kristen is Past President of the Society for Affective Science and an elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and two other scientific societies. She earned her A.B. and Ph.D. from Boston College and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard before spending thirteen years on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Conversations & Coverage