Nancy Alvarado
- Media Contact
I am most interested in the relationship between emotion and cognition, memory for emotional stimuli and experiences, the language used to describe emotion and cross-cultural differences in the subjective experience of emotion. I also study facial expressions of emotion. With Kimberly Jameson, I have been developing and testing a theory of naming as applied to domains such as emotion and color naming. Most recently, I have been studying cultural differences in pain, to improve accurate assessment in medical contexts. From 2000-2002, I worked for IBM Research on Project Joshua, a computer simulation of human cognition that includes emotion as an integral part of its functioning. I am also interested in the development of realistic, model-driven virtual agents and the use of computers to detect human emotion.
Primary Interests:
- Culture and Ethnicity
- Emotion, Mood, Affect
- Internet and Virtual Psychology
- Nonverbal Behavior
- Personality, Individual Differences
- Research Methods, Assessment
- Social Cognition
Journal Articles:
- Alvarado, N. (1998). A reconsideration of the structure of the emotion lexicon. Motivation and Emotion, 22, 329-344.
- Alvarado, N. (1997). Arousal and valence in the direct scaling of emotional response to film clips. Motivation and Emotion, 21, 323-348.
- Alvarado, N. (1996). Congruence of meaning between facial expressions of emotion and selected emotion terms. Motivation and Emotion, 20, 33-61.
- Alvarado, N., Adams, S. S., Burbeck, S., & Latta, C. (2001). Project Joshua Blue: Design considerations for evolving an emotional mind in a simulated environment. Emotional and intelligent II: The tangled knot of social cognition (pp 1-2). Papers from the 2001 AAAI Fall Symposium, Technical Report FS-01-02. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press.
- Alvarado, N., & Jameson, K. (2002). The use of modifying terms in the naming and categorization of color appearances in Vietnamese and English. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2.1, 53-80.
- Alvarado, N., & Jameson, K. (2002). Varieties of anger: The relation between emotion terms and components of anger expressions. Motivation and Emotion, 26(2), 153-182.
- Alvarado, N., & Jameson, K. (1996). New findings on the contempt expression. Cognition and Emotion, 10, 379-407.
- Alvarado, N., & Jameson, K. A. (in press). Shared knowledge about emotion among Vietnamese and English bilingual and monolingual speakers. Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology.
- Alvarado, N., & Jameson, K. A. (2005). Confidence judgments on color category best exemplars. Cross Cultural Research, 39, 134-158.
- Harris, C., & Alvarado, N. (2002). Pain facial expression: Individual variability undermines the specific adaptationist account. Commentary on Williams, Facial expression of pain: An evolutionary account. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25, 461-462.
- Harris, C. R., & Alvarado, N. (2005). Facial expressions, smile types, and self-report during humor, tickle, and pain. Cognition and Emotion, 19, 655-669.
- Jameson, K., & Alvarado, N. (2003). Differences in color naming and color salience in Vietnamese and English. COLOR Research and Application, 28, 113-138.
- Jameson, K., & Alvarado, N. (2003). The relational correspondence between category exemplars and names. Philosophical Psychology, 16, 23-47.
- Sayim, B., Jameson, K. A., Alvarado, N., & Szeszel, M. (2005). Semantic and perceptual representations of color: Evidence of a shared color-naming function. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 5, 165-220.
Courses Taught:
Nancy Alvarado
Department of Psychology and Sociology
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
3801 W. Temple Avenue
Pomona, California 91768
United States of America
- Phone: (909) 869-3896
- Fax: (909) 869-4930