Kristen A. Lindquist

Barrett’s closest collaborator on the empirical face of psychological constructionism, and — belatedly, since the wiki met her work in its first anatomy ingest — the first author of the meta-analysis the theory-of-constructed-emotion rests much of its neuroimaging case on. Given her own page here on the MacCormack (2021) ingest, where she is senior author, because she is now load-bearing on two first-hand wiki studies rather than a name inside Barrett’s.

The position

Lindquist is a constructionist of a particular stripe: her signature emphases are language (emotion words anchor concepts and partly make the categories they name) and, increasingly, development and the lifespan (how emotion concepts are learned in childhood and change across adulthood). Both are consequences of the core constructionist claim that emotions are built, not triggered — if a category is assembled ad hoc from ingredients, then the words that label it and the experiences that populate it are doing constitutive work, and both can shift over a life.

Two first-hand studies, one programme

• Lindquist et al. (2012) is the destructive-and-reconstructive neuroimaging case: no discrete emotion has a consistent-and-specific brain region; what exists instead is a domain-general “neural reference space” (core affect, conceptualization, language, executive attention). This is the paper the wiki cites whenever it needs the empirical form of the natural-kinds critique, as opposed to Barrett’s theoretical statement in barrett-2017-constructed-emotion.
• MacCormack et al. (2021) is the constructive programme run down the lifespan: as the body’s afferent contribution to emotion weakens with age (maturational-dualism), emotional experience should shift toward the situational and conceptual — a prediction of constructionism that the study’s decoupling result (interoception decouples from situations but not behaviors) partly bears out.

Together they show the same theory doing two different jobs: adjudicating the locationist/constructionist brain debate, and predicting how emotion changes when one of its ingredients (interoception) fades.

Relation to Barrett

Co-authors and co-theorists; the division is one of emphasis, not doctrine. Barrett states the theory’s derivation from allostasis and its metaphysics (emotions real as money, not natural kinds); Lindquist supplies much of the meta-analytic evidence and presses the roles of language and development. On the wiki’s cultural-universality-of-emotion gap — the unengaged Nummenmaa challenge — Lindquist’s language-and-concepts emphasis supplies the same “shared concepts, shared maps” reply the Barrett page records, from the developmental side.

Note on this page

Built from two first-hand papers (2012, 2021) plus internal citations. Her extensive work on language, culture, and emotional development beyond these is outside raw/ and summarised only where the read papers touch it.