Board Elections
On behalf of the SAS Executive Committee, we are pleased to announce that we have identified two outstanding candidates to run for the open leadership position of President-Elect of SAS. You may read about each candidate’s past experiences in affective science and SAS below, alongside their visions for our Society’s future. SAS members will be invited in an upcoming email to cast their vote. As an expression of our collective gratitude for these candidates’ willingness to volunteer their time and energy toward the continued growth and improvement of our Society, we encourage all members to vote.
*Please note that voting opens on Wednesday, March 1 and closes on Wednesday, March 15, 2023 at 5:00pm EDT.
Sincerely,
Elaine Fox, SAS Past-President 2021-2022
Barbara L. Fredrickson, SAS Past-President 2020-2021
Nominees for President-Elect
Rachael E. Jack, PhD
Nominee Biography & Statement
I am currently a Professor of Computational Social Cognition, Head of the Centre for Social, Affective & Cognitive Neuroscience (cSCAN), and Director of the Facesyntax lab at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Our team studies how emotions are communicated via facial expressions within and across cultures. We build models of dynamic facial expressions using an interdisciplinary approach (social perception, data-driven methods, vision science, dynamic computer graphics, computational modelling) that inform psychological theories to design socially interactive virtual agents in Artificial Intelligence. The SAS community has been integral to our success, warmly embracing our work and providing visible platforms that have launched several careers.
Since then, I’ve been part of the SAS community, first attending the conference, then as Program Committee member, then Head of Abstracts, and finally Chair of the 2021 Program Committee. Thank you to all who gave me these opportunities and supported me throughout (Renee Thompson, Tammy English, Amitai Shenhav, Barb Fredrickson, the stellar PC of 2021 and many more). Working with exceptionally dedicated, smart, collegial, candid, ambitious, generous and good-humored people, all in the name of community building to benefit affective scientists across the world was a rewarding, humbling and transformative experience.
It also made clear that SAS’s values and ambitions closely mirror my own. My commitment as SAS President to you and our community is clear: to uphold our unique environment and core values—interdisciplinarity, creativity, openness, and blue-sky thinking combined with integrity and rigor, all delivered through education, community building, and outreach that’s founded on accessibility, diversity and inclusivity. Having lived these values with and through SAS, including growing internationally and turning the adversity of the pandemic into new opportunities, my commitment is heartfelt and deep-seated.
Where do we go next? Affective science has never been more important in shaping and understanding all forms of life on earth (humans, animals, plants, AI/virtual agents) and must remain at centre stage to address these complex challenges. My goal would be to establish SAS as the international go-to society by (1) extending our community globally and across disciplines and (2) building new relationships with key international organizations I’m involved with (e.g., Association for Psychological Science—APS, Consortium of European Research on Emotion—CERE, Affective Computing & Intelligent Interaction—ACII).
Finally, SAS’s success is only ever made possible by the people who make up our community and as SAS President my commitment is to welcome and support all those who join us in building it.
Kristen A. Lindquist, PhD
Nominee Biography & Statement
I am a psychologist and neuroscientist who studies how biology and the social context jointly influence affective processes across the lifespan. I received my PhD in Psychology from Boston College and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Neurology at Harvard Medical School. I am currently a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I direct the Social Psychology graduate program and have appointments at the Biomedical Research Imaging Center and Neurobiology Curriculum in the School of Medicine. My Carolina Affective Science Lab investigates topics ranging from the role of language in emotional perceptions and experiences, to the role of the body in emotional experiences, to how neurophysiological and social processes interact to produce health and wellness across the lifespan.
As a scientist who studies emotion and affect using a diverse set of interdisciplinary tools including social cognition, behavior, physiology, neuroimaging, linguistic analysis, and development, I never quite felt at home in other societies. It has thus been my great pleasure to support the founding of the society and its evolution. I have been a member, participant, and leader in SAS since its first conference in 2014, including serving as a member of the Program Committee from 2015-2018, and as the Chair and Past-Chair of the Program Committee in 2018 and 2019, respectively. In 2019, I joined the inaugural team of Associate Editors at Affective Science, and I just began another term. I have additionally served and represented affective science by handling affective science manuscripts as an Associate Editor at the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (2017-2022) and Emotion (2023-present), chairing the Personality and Emotion Program at the annual Association for Psychological Science convention (2019-2022), and co-chairing the Emotion Pre-conference at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2013-2015).
I would be extremely honored to continue to serve SAS as its President-Elect. Affective science continues to grow, and I would like to see SAS become the single most important scholarly society and resource for our unique group of scholars. That means continuing to bridge across interdisciplinary areas and making new in-roads to disciplines beyond psychology and neuroscience. As a growing society—and indeed, as scientists in the 21st century—we are also faced with a range of challenges and opportunities including, 1) how to best balance innovation and new methods with rigor and reproducibility, 2) how to best disseminate and make our work relevant to policymakers and the public at large, 3) how to ensure there is diversity, equity, and inclusivity in science, including those sciences focusing on the nature of human experience, and 5) how to best support the shifting needs and careers of our most junior affective scientists. Over the past decade I have worked on these challenges in my own lab, university, and as a member of the SAS Program Committee. I believe that SAS is well-poised to embrace and innovate around these challenges and opportunities, and I would be honored to help steer its course as it does so.