Spotlight on SAS President Kristen Lindquist
Contributed by Katie Hoemann, PhD
I recently had the opportunity to sit down with SAS President Dr. Kristen Lindquist and ask her a few questions about science, community, and what’s on deck for the Society.
What, for you, is unique or special about the Society for Affective Science?
I have been involved in SAS since its creation, and it has always been special to me because it’s the one place where it feels like my work truly belongs. When your primary focus is on studying emotions (and feelings, moods, etc.) and the mechanisms underlying them, that doesn’t always fit neatly in other subfields. I’ve also always done interdisciplinary work, and each method you use can pigeonhole you into a particular society. SAS, by contrast, is somewhere I go and every single talk is something that I would like to see, a place where any of my trainees could submit their work (whether behavioral, neuroscience, linguistic, developmental, what have you) and it would be a reasonable fit. I had not felt that elsewhere as an emerging scientist, as a junior professor, and now as a full professor. It’s my intellectual home and I know many others who feel that way.
You mentioned interdisciplinarity, and I wanted to follow up on that, as a cornerstone of SAS. What does interdisciplinarity mean to you, and how has it influenced your work?
As somebody who studies emotion, I’ve found that we have a somewhat unique challenge. Emotions are ultimately incredibly abstract phenomena: they have physiological correlates, and they have behavioral correlates, and psychological correlates, but at the end of the day, there’s no single index that alone tells you exactly what somebody is feeling. As a result, I employ many different methods to try to triangulate this latent construct that we’re interested in. So, to me, interdisciplinarity is drawing from the methods that best address your question. Of course, that means having to know something about how to use those methods and how to use them right – and who to go to for answers to questions, because of course you can’t know everything! Interdisciplinarity is reaching across the traditional boundaries, as most scientists think about them, to answer phenomenon-driven questions.
How or where do you want to see the Society grow – what’s next?
It’s an exciting time for SAS. Last year, in advance of the annual conference, we held a strategic planning meeting organized by Past President Maya Tamir and then President Maital Neta. It was a fun and interesting opportunity to take stock of where we’re at as a society. For so many years, we were a fledgling society that had to survive some serious existential challenges. Now we’re into our adolescence, we’re growing up and looking forward to how we want to continue to exist as a mature society. We’re thinking of our members and, in an outward-facing capacity, of other representatives of our field – the stakeholders in government and industry, and all the people in the world who should know something about affective science. As a result, we have come up with several strategic goals that we’re going to set into motion over the next 4 years. We also have identified a couple of longer-term priorities that we will implement over the next 8 years.
What we’ve been doing this year as the Executive Board is building the internal capacity of the Society: we’ve expanded the Board in size quite a bit so that we have the person power to accommodate more special projects, and to be more consistent with best practices for how non-profit organizations like this are run. We’ve modernized our by-laws and changed voting processes, too. SAS started off as a small society, where the president and the president-elect were voted on, but everyone else was appointed. Now we’re moving toward a democratic process where much of the Board is elected, so that all members have a stronger voice in how the Society is run.
We’re also focused on the organization of the committees that are doing so much of the work that makes SAS the great society it is. We’ve integrated committee leadership with the Board (Stephanie Carpenter, co-chair of the Membership and Outreach committee, Luis Flores, co-chair of the Fundraising committee, and Hongbo Yu, co-chair of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee now hold formal positions on the Board). Really, what we’re doing is setting up pathways for people who are interested in being involved in SAS to gain experience with the Society, leadership experience on committees, and then move into governance. The goal, in all of this, is to create more transparency in how the Society works, to let people into the process!
So, on that topic of thinking about including and growing scientists: What do you want young, aspiring affective scientists to know about the Society or about the field?
As part of our strategic planning, we have revised our mission and our values. One of the core values that we articulated is that support is a guiding principle in the Society. What that means is that our goal is to provide members with opportunities for training, mentorship, and development. And that’s really at all stages of people’s careers. Support is sometimes seen as being focused on our youngest trainees, but it is certainly not limited to them. We are a society that is created by members for members, that aims to help affective scientists build their science and their professional identity across their career. That spirit has been with us from the beginning. And I think it’s particularly important for trainees to know that they’re truly elevated here. If we want to build affective science as a field, then we need to build it from the ground up: by supporting the careers of people in the field, from start to end, as they evolve.
Is there anything else that you want to say to the newsletter readers?
It’s been a tremendous honor to feel, for this short year, that I’ve been able to give back to the Society that has been so formative in my own career.