Jeannette Haviland-Jones, Senior Fellow (Large Scale Initiatives, General Education Reform)

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Jeannette Haviland-Jones is a Professor of Psychology and Director of the Human Emotions Laboratory at Rutgers University. She received her BA in Psychology and Mathematics from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Michigan State University. She is currently the Vice Chair for Undergraduate Education in the Psychology department ? a department with 1200 majors and a concentration in lab-based social science. She attended SSI 2003 as a team member and subsequently reinvented Adolescent Psychology (a course for Psych majors and pre-service teachers) as a SENCER course. This included new formative assessment strategies and teaching methods that develop critical, scientific thinking. These methods move the student from being a consumer of facts to a producer of new knowledge. Jeannette is co-director (with Terry McGuire) of the SENCER Consortium for the Assessment of Student Achievement (CASA). Jeannette has developed tools for approaching emotion as a dynamic system that influences complex thought processes and man kinds of behavior, including autonomic behavior. Recently she has included semiochemicals as another method of non-verbal emotional communication. The semiochemicals ? fragrances, odorants, pheromones, and body odors influence mood, attitude, memory, reaction time and social behavior. This study includes environmental influences on emotion and well-being. In a very popular set of studies, Jeannette and her colleagues (including Terry McGuire and Pat Wilson, both SENCER alumni) showed that flowers and even flower scents promote happiness in people. They suggested an evolutionary theory in which flowers became the “pets” of the plant world and are supported by people to reciprocate emotional support lending a bit of support to general wellness. She has published several books on adolescence or on emotion and is co-editor of the Handbook of Emotion (three editions). The Human Emotions Lab supports the scholarly work of both graduate and undergraduate students and is a site of lively investigation.

Jeannette Haviland-Jones, Senior Fellow (Large Scale Initiatives, General Education Reform)

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