Jennifer K. MacCormack

The wiki’s entry point into emotional aging and the constructionist study of the body’s changing role in emotion across the lifespan. Known here through one paper read first-hand — MacCormack et al. (2021) — trained in Kristen Lindquist’s lab and working in the Barrett/Lindquist psychological-constructionist tradition.

The position

MacCormack’s programme takes the constructionist premise — emotion is built from bodily/affective input plus conceptualization — and asks a developmental question the field had mostly skipped: what happens to the bodily input across adulthood? Her answer, via maturational-dualism, is that it thins, especially for high-arousal sensations, so older adults’ emotions become progressively less embodied and more situational — a body-based complement to the motivational (socioemotional selectivity) and expertise accounts that had owned the emotional-aging literature.

A distinctive move in her work is separating interoceptive knowledge — what one knows, idiographically and culturally, about which sensations accompany which emotions — from interoceptive accuracy (a perceptual ability) and sensibility (beliefs about one’s own interoception). The 2021 aging paper’s Study 1 measures knowledge/association, not accuracy, and the distinction is load-bearing for reading it correctly (see interoceptive-sensitivity, interoceptive-taxonomy).

Why the wiki holds a page for her

Under the load-bearing-figure convention (as with Schandry, Katkin, Ehlers, Craske), not blanket co-authorship: MacCormack is the lead architect of the aging-and-interoception thread that opens the Aging/ folder, and her methods, meta-analysis and pharmacological work are cited across the 2021 paper as the scaffolding for a research programme likely to recur as the aging sources are ingested. Co-authors on the 2021 paper without pages: Teague Henry (statistics), Brian Davis, and Barrett-lineage social psychologist Suzanne Oosterwijk (property-association-task methodology; held to the co-author convention). Senior author Lindquist has her own page.

Note on this page

Built from a single first-hand paper plus its internal citations. MacCormack’s broader work on stress, beta-adrenergic contributions to emotion, and children’s interoceptive development is outside what raw/ contains; this page summarises only what the wiki has read and the tradition that locates her.