SAS 2025 Board Elections

I am an Associate Professor and Associate Department Chair at the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. I earned my PhD in Biological and Cognitive Psychology from the Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Netherlands and completed a post doc in the Laboratory of Cognition and Emotion at the University of Maryland directed by Dr. Luiz Pessoa.

I first attended a SAS conference in 2016 in Chicago and was so excited to finally have found a conference that fit my research interests. I think the Society for Affective Science (SAS) and its conference fill such an important gap in the scientific community. I love the innovative formats of the conference sessions and the multidisciplinarity of the society. I served on the program committee for the SAS conference in Boston in 2017 and have been serving on the SAS publication committee since 2023. I plan to attend this year’s conference in Portland, which will be my sixth time attending a SAS conference.

I direct the Neurocognition of Emotion and Motivation lab. Research in my lab focuses on the interaction between emotions and cognition, such as emotional memory and emotion regulation. Much of our research focuses on the interaction between romantic love and cognition, including how being in love may distract you from other duties (such as work or homework) and love regulation. Our research focuses on the intrapersonal aspects of romantic love and fits within the realm of affective and cognitive neuroscience. I hope that research on romantic love will increase its positive effects and decrease its negative effects on individuals and society.

I am eager to increase my contributions to SAS by becoming a Director at Large. I could represent interests of international scholars within the society, since I’m originally from The Netherlands and understand some of the challenges (and benefits!) of being an international scholar. It is my aim to promote non-competitive, collaborative science. After all, we are all working towards the same goal of improving life by increasing our evidence-based knowledge of affect. Thank you for your consideration!

I am a Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University where I direct the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory (IASL) together with Drs. Lisa Feldman Barrett and Jordan Theriault. In my basic science research, I examine the psychophysiological, behavioral, and contextual features associated with instances of affective experience. A key interest is in the internal signals arising from the body that convey current bodily metabolic status to the brain. My recent work focuses on understanding the sources of observed variation in patterns of physiological features that occur during different instances of the same emotional experience, such as when a person feels anger or fear. This work utilized a new methodology that I and my colleagues innovated — biologically-triggered experience sampling — to measure real-world experience alongside measures of physiology, behavior, and context. This approach aims to enhance the efficiency of experience sampling during evocative moments in daily life and provides a broad range of signals that can be used to better understand how features of the person and their context structures the observed variation. In my applied research, I use health technologies, along with a person’s own physiological data, to motivate a person to make behavior changes, with the goal of improving health behaviors such as sleep or physical activity. In other applied work, I assess how affective experience is linked to negative functional impacts or health outcomes in those who have experienced a major life event like a military deployment or a terrorism event.

I am a former president of the Society for Psychophysiological Research, and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research, and an inaugural Fellow of the Society for Psychophysiological Research. I have been a member of SAS since its inception. I have served in various roles, including as a Mentor at the Annual Meeting luncheon event, and for the 2025 annual meeting, as a Salon invitee. I would like to help further grow the membership of SAS by engaging scientists from a wider range of disciplines to join us, including by attending the annual meeting. I also want to support the Society in broadening its educational outreach to constituents who use, disseminate, and fund our science.

I am a fairly recent convert to the joys of SAS, although I have been a researcher in/around affective science for much longer than that. Colleagues told me “SAS is great” and “You should check out SAS” but I never did, and then the pandemic squashed my conference plans for a while. I finally attended SAS two years ago, and I immediately felt like I found my society home. As a clinical psychologist at the intersection of social, personality, and clinical psychology with interests in emotion, no other organization fits me the way that SAS does. I love that SAS’s conference programming emphasizes cutting edge *new* work and conversations reflect the current issues people are grappling with in their data analysis, theory, and methods. I learn a ton and feel energized when I am at SAS, in a way I have never felt at other conferences. I would love to be a part of helping SAS grow with attention to keeping the scrappy, cross-disciplinary spirit of SAS alive. I want SAS to always feel invigorating and that the conference is a place to get to know people even if the membership grows and the conference gets bigger.

I am an Associate Professor of Psychological Science and a licensed clinical psychologist. I received my PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2011. My research focuses on problems of emotion and self-regulation that underlie psychological symptoms that prompt people to seek psychotherapy (i.e., depression, anxiety, eating pathology, substance use, non-suicidal self-injury, trauma, self-criticism). My work has been funded by the John Templeton Foundation, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the National Institute of Mental Health, and I have over 85 published peer-reviewed papers. I am particularly interested in examining factors that most people consider from an individual difference lens (e.g., distress intolerance, self-criticism, emotion beliefs) from a state perspective (i.e., personality states). I am currently focused on understanding why so many people struggle to allow and tolerate their distress, by exploring momentary emotional and cognitive factors (e.g., self-criticism, perceived willpower, self-efficacy for emotion regulation) that underlie the emotion regulation choices that people make in moments of time. I am the author of an upcoming book (Spring/Summer 2025), Open to Emotion: How Acknowledging, Using, and Regulating Your Feelings Can Improve Your Mental Health published by the American Psychological Association, which aims to teach people what they need to know about the science of emotion and emotion regulation to be able to live an emotionally healthier life.