Researcher at a glance
- Affiliation: Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; affective science / social neuroscience
- Orientation: Psychological constructionism (with Barrett); emotions as constructed from domain-general ingredients (core affect, conceptualization, language, executive attention); the role of language and the body in building emotion, across culture and the lifespan
Key contributions
- First author of Lindquist, Wager, Kober, Bliss-Moreau & Barrett (2012), the meta-analysis that operationalized the natural-kinds critique as a neuroimaging test and found no brain region consistently and specifically active for any discrete emotion — the wiki’s most detailed empirical case for constructionism over locationism.
- Senior author of MacCormack et al. (2021), extending the constructionist account developmentally: the felt/represented body in emotion weakens with age (Maturational dualism), so emotional experience shifts toward the situational/conceptual as afferent bodily signal thins.
- A principal theorist of the role of language in emotion construction (Lindquist, MacCormack & Shablack 2015; Lindquist 2013), holding that emotion words anchor otherwise loosely-bounded conceptual categories.
- Works on how emotion category representations are learned in childhood and updated across adulthood (Doyle & Lindquist 2018 — novel instances can shift adult category representations), grounding the constructionist claim that emotion concepts are dynamic rather than fixed.
Key papers
- Lindquist, K. A., Wager, T. D., Kober, H., Bliss-Moreau, E., & Barrett, L. F. (2012). The brain basis of emotion: A meta-analytic review. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 35(3), 121-143. doi:10.1017/S0140525X11000446 — Lindquist et al. (2012)
- MacCormack, J. K., Henry, T. R., Davis, B. M., Oosterwijk, S., & Lindquist, K. A. (2021). Aging bodies, aging emotions. Emotion, 21(2), 227-246. doi:10.1037/emo0000699 — MacCormack et al. (2021)
- Lindquist, K. A., Satpute, A. B., Wager, T. D., Weber, J., & Barrett, L. F. (2016). The brain basis of positive and negative affect: Evidence from a meta-analysis. Cerebral Cortex, 26, 1910-1922. — not in raw/, cited within the 2021 paper.
- Lindquist, K. A., MacCormack, J. K., & Shablack, H. (2015). The role of language in emotion. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 444. — not in raw/, known here by citation.
- Lindquist, K. A. (2013). Emotions emerge from more basic psychological ingredients: A modern psychological constructionist model. Emotion Review, 5, 356-368. — not in raw/, known here by citation.
Connections
Barrett’s closest collaborator on the empirical face of psychological constructionism, and — belatedly, since the wiki met her work in its first anatomy ingest — the first author of the meta-analysis the Theory of constructed emotion rests much of its neuroimaging case on. Given her own page here on the MacCormack (2021) ingest, where she is senior author, because she is now load-bearing on two first-hand wiki studies rather than a name inside Barrett’s.
The position
Lindquist is a constructionist of a particular stripe: her signature emphases are language (emotion words anchor concepts and partly make the categories they name) and, increasingly, development and the lifespan (how emotion concepts are learned in childhood and change across adulthood). Both are consequences of the core constructionist claim that emotions are built, not triggered — if a category is assembled ad hoc from ingredients, then the words that label it and the experiences that populate it are doing constitutive work, and both can shift over a life.
Two first-hand studies, one programme
- Lindquist et al. (2012) is the destructive-and-reconstructive neuroimaging case: no discrete emotion has a consistent-and-specific brain region; what exists instead is a domain-general “neural reference space” (core affect, conceptualization, language, executive attention). This is the paper the wiki cites whenever it needs the empirical form of the natural-kinds critique, as opposed to Barrett’s theoretical statement in Barrett (2017).
- MacCormack et al. (2021) is the constructive programme run down the lifespan: as the body’s afferent contribution to emotion weakens with age (Maturational dualism), emotional experience should shift toward the situational and conceptual — a prediction of constructionism that the study’s decoupling result (interoception decouples from situations but not behaviors) partly bears out.
Together they show the same theory doing two different jobs: adjudicating the locationist/constructionist brain debate, and predicting how emotion changes when one of its ingredients (Interoception) fades.
Relation to Barrett
Co-authors and co-theorists; the division is one of emphasis, not doctrine. Barrett states the theory’s derivation from Allostasis and its metaphysics (emotions real as money, not natural kinds); Lindquist supplies much of the meta-analytic evidence and presses the roles of language and development. On the wiki’s Are emotions culturally universal? gap — the unengaged Nummenmaa challenge — Lindquist’s language-and-concepts emphasis supplies the same “shared concepts, shared maps” reply the Barrett page records, from the developmental side.
Note on this page
Built from two first-hand papers (2012, 2021) plus internal citations. Her extensive work on language, culture, and emotional development beyond these is outside raw/ and summarised only where the read papers touch it.