2024

  • Presented a keynote talk on some new lab work on “Stressing me out! Does hunger exacerbate physiological and psychological stress?” at the 2024 UVA Behavioral Science Across Grounds Conference.

2023

  • New work ahead! I received a collaborative research grant from the NSF to study “The Role of Stress in Human Crowd Dynamics during Emergency Situations” alongside collaborators Dr. Nicole Abaid in Mathematics at Virginia Tech, Dr. Sachit Butail in Mechanical Engineering at University of Illinois, and Dr. Alethea Barbaro in Mathematical Physics at TU Delft. With these data, the VAIL will be able to address questions about the roles of interoceptive and social sensitivity in group stress contagion and physiological synchrony.

  • See a recent Scientific American article on how “Art May Be in the Body of the Beholder” where I was interviewed about the roles of embodiment, physiology, and interoception to aesthetic experiences.

  • Honored to be giving the keynote address at Shepherd University’s 14th annual Aging Well Workshop, this year focused on interoception. My talk will discuss “Interoception for Emotional Health and Well-Being Across the Lifespan.” Come join us on May 9th 2023 either in-person or virtually! https://agingwellworkshop.totalcamps.com/

  • Delighted to continue serving on the Editorial Board for Affective Science and to start in 2023 as part of the Editorial Board for Emotion. Send us your best emotion research and affective science work!

2022

  • See a new interview with me on Understanding Interoception, the Sixth Sense in Psychology Today on Dr. Marianna Pogosyan’s “Between Cultures” blog. The piece was selected as a special feature for the front page’s “Essential Reads”!

  • First day as a new assistant professor! The Virginia Affect and Interoception Laboratory’s doors are officially open, and we can’t wait to start collecting data.

  • My dissertation work on the role of interoception in acute stress was featured in the inaugural Society for Affective Science Newsletter (February 2022). You can read the feature here!

  • Announcing the Virginia Affect and Interoception Laboratory! Starting August 2022, I will be opening a new lab in the Psychology Department at the University of Virginia. This lab will broadly investigate the physiological, neural, & psychological pathways by which the visceral body and interoception can contribute to affect, sociality, and behavior across the lifespan. You can learn more about the lab at our new website: https://www.virginiaaffectlab.com

2021

  • It’s official!!! So excited to finally announce that I will be joining the Department of Psychology at the University of Virginia as a tenure-track assistant professor in Social Psychology starting August 2022 once I finish my post-doc at the University of Pittsburgh. Watch this space over the upcoming year as I begin getting my lab set up. Feeling so much gratitude and cannot wait to continue the journey with the wonderful community at UVA!

  • Blown away to receive the Society for Affective Science’s inaugural Best Dissertation in Affective Science award during the 2021 Annual Meeting! I’ve attended SAS every year since I was a 1st year graduate student—which was the same year that the society was founded. From the very start, this community has always been my science haven, a space of upward opportunity, and one of my biggest sources of inspiration. SAS is in part special because as a society, they have a true heart and regard for their students and early career folks. It’s been amazing to watch the society grow in such lively ways over the years in parallel as I have grown into a scientist. SAS continues to enrich the field of affective science through their continued emphases on interdisciplinary methods and diversity. I deeply look forward to seeing how SAS and we as a field continue to flourish in years to come.

 
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  • Hooray! Our work on beta-adrenergic blockade and risk-taking was recently accepted at Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. This paper highlights that a certain degree of neurophysiological arousal can actually be facilitative in risk-related learning and advantageous decision-making.

2020

 
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  • I have officially graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience (specifically, Social Psychology with a concentration in Quantitative Psychology). Thank you, UNC, for the wonderful years of training, growth, and community!

  • It finally happened! Today, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, I remotely defended my dissertation on “Minding the body: The role of interoception in linking physiology and emotion during acute stress.” So proud to now be Dr. MacCormack!! Thank you to my advisors Kristen Lindquist & Keely Muscatell, and to the rest of my wonderful committee members - Katie Gates, Keith Payne, and Jon Abramowitz.

 
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  • Media alert! I shared with Elemental how hunger, context, and interoceptive (bodily) awareness may work together to shape whether or not and how much hunger might influence our feelings and behaviors. Read the piece here.

  • I was stoked to present some new data as a flash talk at the Society for Affective Science’s 2020 meeting in San Francisco, entitled Linking emotion concepts to cognitive and bodily states across 2,474 languages. Unfortunately, the conference had to be cancelled due to the coronavirus, but we are preparing findings for submission as a manuscript!

2019

  • My work on why we become hangry was featured in the New York Times just in time for Thanksgiving! Read here.

  • Ever wondered how aging of the body could impact emotions in later life? In a paper now accepted at Emotion, we examined across two studies how interoceptive / physiological mental representations and daily self-reports differ across adulthood, as a first step in answering that question. In this paper, we also delve deeper into current models of emotional aging, arguing why any such model should consider peripheral nervous system and interoceptive aging.

  • Woo! Check out my new review paper with Keely Muscatell on “The metabolic mind: A role for leptin and ghrelin in affect and social cognition” - out now in Social and Personality Psychology Compass. In this paper, we review evidence suggesting that metabolic hormones leptin and ghrelin are not only sensitive to social/context signals and stressors, but also can feed into affect and a variety of social cognitive and behavioral processes.

  • I won a “Best Symposium Talk” award at the 2019 Carolina Research in Social and Personality Psychology (CRISPP) conference for my work on beta-adrenergic blockade during acute stress!

  • I’m off to give a couple talks at the Society for Affective Science’s 2019 meeting, this year in Boston. My spotlight talk on Thursday is entitled Aging bodies, aging emotions: Interoceptive differences in emotion representations and self-reports across adulthood. My flash talk in on Saturday is entitled, Emotion in the aging brain: A neuroimaging meta-analysis of functional activation differences in older vs. younger adult emotions. Please come say hello!

 
The Carolina Social Neuroscience & Health lab at the 2019 American Psychosomatic Society meeting in Vancouver!

The Carolina Social Neuroscience & Health lab at the 2019 American Psychosomatic Society meeting in Vancouver!

  • I received a MacLean Scholars travel award from the American Psychosomatic Society to present a talk at the 2019 meeting in Vancouver on Inflammatory and antiviral/antibody gene expressions during acute psychosocial stress. Absolutely loved this year’s “Body to Mind” theme and got to meet and chat with Dr. Antonio Damasio as part of the travel award!

  • I can’t wait to give a talk at SPSP’s 2019 Emotion Preconference on using a pharmacological approach to target specific mechanisms in sympathetic nervous system contributions to affective stress.

 

2018

  • See a write-up by the UNC Psychology and Neuroscience Department featuring my work on both hunger and aging in Kristen Lindquist’s lab here!

  • Kristen Lindquist and I had fun chatting with UNC’s podcast “Well Said” about our work on feeling #hangry. You can listen to the whole thing here (it’s about 14 min long).

  • The Carolina Social Neuroscience and Health lab (my second lab home) was featured in the American Psychosomatic Society Fall 2018 Newsletter! Read the interview with Dr. Keely Muscatell and see what our lab is getting up to these days!

  • I was interviewed on WUNC's The State of Things to discuss the background and science behind hanger. Listen here! 

  • I had a fun chat with The Naked Scientist podcast, based in Cambridge, UK, what unique insights about the body-mind link can be garnered from our studies on feeling hangry. Listen and read here! 

  • Check out my recent appearance on "The Morning Dose" - which aired on TV stations in Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, Portland, Washington DC, and Miami to discuss how hanger works and some tips from science on how to reduce those hangry feelings. Our research was also discussed on several daytime and evening TV programs, such as The View!

  • I discussed why we become hangry on the following radio shows and stations: Top of Mind with Julie Rose (U.S. national), KCBS Radio (San Francisco), the Natasha Hall Show and the Aaron Rand Show both on CJAD800 (Montreal, Canada), the Paul Ross Show with talkRADIO (UK), detektor.fm (based in Leipzig, Germany), and TBS eFM's "This Morning" English radio program in Seoul, Korea. You can listen to a short recording of one of my interviews here or at one of the links above.

  • I wrote about how we become hangry at The Conversation. Read here! Already at >150,000 unique readers! :O

  • At UNC Department of Psychology & Neuroscience's 2018 commencement ceremony, I was honored to receive the student-nominated and student-elected Psi Chi 2018 Teaching Award for Excellent Undergraduate Student Instruction. 

  • Major congratulations to Adrienne Bonar who defended her senior honors thesis on Misleading sensations? How body signal beliefs interact with sympathetic reactivity and interoceptive ability to predict affective stress and received highest honors! Adrienne worked with me for the past three years as a research assistant and just accepted a position in Dr. Margaret Sheridan's lab in Clinical Psychology at UNC-CH! 

  • My poster Arousal, awareness, or appraisal? A double-blind study with propranolol comparing the relative roles of sympathetic activation, interoception, and appraisals in affective responses to stress based on work from Dr. Keely Muscatell's lab just won a 2018 Citation Poster Award from the American Psychosomatic Society! It was presented at the 2018 American Psychosomatic Society meeting in Louisville, KY and was published in their journal Psychosomatic Medicine. 

  • Adrienne Bonar, an honors thesis student in the CASL whom I’ve been lucky to mentor (and one of the first students I ever taught!), presented her senior thesis work as first author on a poster entitled Believing your body: Beliefs about the value, regulation, and intensity of bodily signals matter for interoceptive and emotional awareness at the 2018 Society for Affective Science meeting in Los Angeles, CA. Congrats!

2017

  • I received a teaching commendation from the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of Psychology and Neuroscience for excellent undergraduate education in my Introduction to Social Psychology course in Fall 2017.

  • I was featured in the UNC Psychology & Neuroscience Department annual alumni newsletter's graduate student spotlight. You can read the feature here. 

  • Adrienne Bonar, an honors thesis student in the CASL whom I mentor, received a David Bray Peele Memorial Research Award to support her outstanding senior honors thesis research on interoception, body signal beliefs, and emotion experience. Congrats!

  • Woohoo! Shocked and delighted to announce that I’ve received a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Individual Predoctoral Fellowship (F31) from the National Institute on Aging to study how age-related changes in the nervous system can impact emotions. My project is entitled: "Neural Differences Across the Lifespan in Autonomic and Interoceptive Representations during Emotion". The purpose of the Kirschstein-NRSA program is to support promising predoctoral students as they develop into productive, independent research scientists via targeted doctoral research training. 

  • A Yahoo News article on the power of language discussed a paper that I co-authored with Kristen Lindquist! You can read the news article here. 

  • Throughout Summer 2017, the Carolina Affective Science Lab welcomed SPSP Summer Program for Undergraduate Research (SPUR) scholar Dhariyya Singh as an intern. Dhariyya visited Chapel Hill from Ashoka University in India and worked with me on a functional neuroimaging meta-analysis, under Dr. Lindquist's guidance. You can read about his experience working with us here. 

  • I received a teaching commendation from the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of Psychology and Neuroscience for excellent undergraduate education in my Introduction to Social Psychology course in Spring 2017. 

  • I won a Best Poster Award at the 2017 Society for Affective Science meeting in Boston for my poster on Interoceptive sensitivity and physiological reactivity differentially predict emotional and somatic experiences. See it here. Another highlight of the conference was attending a Methods Lunch on interoception and the embodied self. 

  • Congratulations to Jenna Perry who successfully defended her senior honors thesis on Interoceptive and autonomic differences in emotional intensity and received highest honors for her strong work. Congrats! Jenna accepted a lab manager position in Dr. Liz Losin's Social & Cultural Neuroscience Laboratory at University of Miami. 

  • I was elected the 2017-2018 Chair of the Student Committee for the Society for Affective Science. In this role, I hop to promote greater student diversity and inter-disciplinary perspectives on affective science.  

  • I was selected as a Fellow for the 2017 Summer School in Social Neuroscience and Neuroeconomics! This year's summer school is focused on bringing together aging research with social affective neuroscience. You can read more about the summer school here. 

  • Jenna Perry, an honors thesis student in the CASL whom I mentor, received a travel award from UNC's Office of Undergraduate Research to attend the upcoming meeting of the 2017 Society for Affective Science meeting in Boston, MA. Jenna will present her senior thesis work on physiological reactivity and interoception. Congrats!

  • I was selected in a blind-reviewed process to present my research on Interoceptive sensitivity and physiological reactivity differentially predict emotional and somatic experiences as a special invited flash talk at the 2017 Society for Affective Science annual meeting in Boston, MA.

2016

  • I received a teaching commendation from the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of Psychology and Neuroscience for excellent undergraduate education in my Psychology Research Methods course in Fall 2016. 

  • Adrienne Bonar was interviewed about her undergraduate research experience working with Kristen and me in the Carolina Affective Science Lab. Read the feature in the Carolina Endeavors magazine here! 

  • I received a Graduate Student Travel Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology to present my research on Feeling hangry: Conceptualizing hunger as emotion in context at the Society's 2017 annual meeting in San Antonio, TX.

  • Hooray! I successfully defended my masters thesis entitled Feeling hangry: When hunger is conceptualized as emotion. 

  • Our research on how people become hangry was featured in the Spring 2016 issue of the Carolina Scientific. You can read the article here.

  • I received the 2016 Agnew Research Innovation Award from the Social Psychology program in UNC's Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. The award is given annually to a student who demonstrates the most scholarly independence and promise. 

  • Congratulations to Andrea Zuniga who successfully defended her senior honors thesis on Individual differences in interoceptive emotion knowledge and emotion experience. Congrats, Andrea!

  • I was selected in a blind-reviewed process to present my research on Feeling hangry: Hunger misattributed as emotion as a special invited flash talk at the 2016 Society for Affective Science annual meeting in Chicago, IL.

2015

  • Andrea Zuniga, an honors thesis student in the CASL whom I’ve mentored, received a David Bray Peele Memorial Research Award to support her senior honors thesis research on interoception and emotion experience. Congrats!

  • Brian Davis successfully defended his senior honors thesis on Interoceptive differences in older versus younger adults’ emotion concepts. Congratulations, Brian! 

  • I received an Honorable Mention from the National Science Foundation for my Graduate Research Fellowship proposal on hunger's impact on emotion experience.

  • I received a Dashiell Research Travel Award from the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience to present my research on aging and embodied emotion at the 2015 Society for Affective Science annual meeting in Oakland, CA.

2014

  • Brian Davis, an honors thesis student in the CASL whom I’ve mentored, received a grant from the Lindquist Undergraduate Excellence Fund to present his research at the first ever annual meeting of the Society for Affective Science! Brian further received an Honors Undergraduate Research Award from Honors Carolina. The award supported his senior honors thesis assessing the impact of aging on embodied emotion concept knowledge. Congrats, Brian! 

2013

  • I received an American Psychological Association Psi Chi Junior Scientist fellowship for my research on the role of hunger in emotions. 

  • I joined the Carolina Affective Science Laboratory as a doctoral student under Dr. Kristen Lindquist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I originally wanted to study emotional complexity or granularity with Kristen, but quickly realized I wanted to focus more on the bodily and interoceptive underpinnings of emotion. 

  • I graduated from North Carolina State University summa cum laude and successfully completed my senior honors thesis on "Mothers' complexity of emotion understanding supports children's socioemotional competence in school" with Dr. Amy Halberstadt in the Family Affect, Beliefs, & Behaviors Laboratory. This thesis identified that some mothers have more "interoceptive knowledge" or knowledge about the body in emotion, sparking my interest in the bodily and interoceptive underpinnings of emotion.