Researcher at a glance
- Affiliation: Trained in the Lindquist lab, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (NIA predoctoral fellow at the time of the aging work); affective science / health psychology
- Orientation: Psychological constructionism (Lindquist/Barrett lineage) applied to the body’s role in emotion across the lifespan and in health; interoception, autonomic reactivity, and ‘interoceptive knowledge’ as ingredients of constructed emotion
Key contributions
- Lead author of MacCormack et al. (2021), the first study to test whether the association between emotion and the felt body changes across adulthood — finding an interoceptive-specific, high-arousal decline from mid-life onward across two methods (a property-association task and the Day Reconstruction Method).
- Deploys Maturational dualism (Mendes 2010) as a body-based complement to motivational and expertise accounts of emotional aging, and reads it through psychological constructionism.
- With Lindquist, articulated ‘interoceptive knowledge’ — what a person knows about the bodily sensations that go with emotions, drawn from idiographic experience and culture — as a distinct interoceptive construct alongside accuracy and sensibility (MacCormack, Castro, Halberstadt & Rogers 2019, on mothers’ interoceptive knowledge).
- Co-author of a neuroimaging meta-analysis of affect in the aging brain (MacCormack, Stein et al. 2019) and of a beta-adrenergic-blockade study of emotion under acute stress (MacCormack, Armstrong-Carter et al. 2019) — the pharmacological approach that would be the missing causal test of maturational dualism.
- Author of MacCormack & Lindquist (2017), ‘Bodily contributions to emotion: Schachter’s legacy for a psychological constructionist view on emotion’ — placing Schachter’s two-factor arousal-plus-cognition inheritance inside the constructionist frame.
Key papers
- MacCormack, J. K., Henry, T. R., Davis, B. M., Oosterwijk, S., & Lindquist, K. A. (2021). Aging bodies, aging emotions: Interoceptive differences in emotion representations and self-reports across adulthood. Emotion, 21(2), 227-246. doi:10.1037/emo0000699 — MacCormack et al. (2021)
- MacCormack, J. K., & Lindquist, K. A. (2017). Bodily contributions to emotion: Schachter’s legacy for a psychological constructionist view on emotion. Emotion Review, 9, 36-45. — not in raw/, known here by citation.
- MacCormack, J. K., Castro, V. L., Halberstadt, A. G., & Rogers, M. L. (2019). Mothers’ interoceptive knowledge predicts children’s emotion regulation and social skills in middle childhood. — not in raw/, cited within the 2021 paper for the ‘interoceptive knowledge’ construct.
- MacCormack, J. K., Stein, A. G., Giovanello, K. S., Kang, J., Satpute, A. B., & Lindquist, K. A. (2019). Affect in the aging brain: A neuroimaging meta-analysis. — not in raw/, cited for age differences in visceromotor activation.
Connections
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 (Farb et al. Box 1)).
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.