Ph.D., U.C.L.A, 1974
Office: McGuinn 525
Lab: McGuinn 428
Phone: (617) 552-4546
Email: james.russell.1@bc.edu
Website: http://www2.bc.edu/~russeljm
Scholarly Interests: Emotion. The expression and recognition of emotion through faces. Children's understanding of emotion and the development of emotional experience.Cultural influences on emotion. The distinction between mood and emotion and scientific taxonomies of each.
Academic Profile: Prof. Russell's research centers on human emotion. His interest began with the question of how large-scale environments (such as homes, offices, malls) and social events (chatting with a friend, working with a team) influence emotion and thereby influence various activities and outcomes. This led to the fundamental question of how emotions can be described and then assessed. Some specific ideas pursued are a circumplex model of emotion, a prototype theory of emotion concepts, which leads to the idea that specific emotions are understood in terms of scripts, a defence of the traditional view that displeasure is the opposite of pleasure, a skeptical review of the traditional view that basic emotions are universally and easily recognized from facial expressions. More recently, the question has arisen of how these various ideas fit together within a larger framework. An analysis is being developed called "the psychological construction of emotion."
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