Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Social Psychology, is a recipient of the 2016-17 James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical Fund Fellowship.
The Cattell Fellowships have provided support for the science and application of psychology for over half a century. The James McKeen Cattell Fund was established by a gift from James McKeen Cattell in 1942 to support scientific research and the dissemination of knowledge. The Cattell Fellowship supplements the regular sabbatical allowances provided by recipients’ home institutions to allow an extension of leave.
Dr. Fredrickson plans to use her Cattell sabbatical to expand her methodological toolkit to assess the non-conscious, physiological, and neural underpinnings of face-to-face emotional connections. In residence at University of California Berkeley, Dr. Fredrickson will work with Berkeley-based collaborators and archival couples’ data to measure a new construct, positivity resonance, which refers to positive emotions that are momentarily co-experienced by two or more individuals simultaneously.