Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones

Introduction

Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones is an American psychologist known for two research programs that are rarely pursued together: the development of emotional expression across the lifespan, and the chemical communication of emotion through body odor. Her early work described how infants display emotion and how gender differences in emotional expression emerge; in the 1990s she founded the Human Emotions Laboratory at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and turned to the study of semiochemicals, arguing that fragrances, odorants, and body odors are a genuine channel of nonverbal emotional communication. She is also a co-editor of the four editions of the Handbook of Emotions, the standard reference work in the field.

Early Life and Education

Haviland-Jones received a Bachelor of Arts in psychology and mathematics from Harvard University and a PhD in developmental psychology from Michigan State University. Her early research concerned emotional displays in infancy, the development of gender differences in emotion, and the organizing effects of emotion on personality, and it established a pattern she kept throughout her career: a preference for observable, measurable behavior over self-report, and for transitional periods such as adolescence, when emotional systems are visibly in flux.

With Michelle Lelwica she developed the Induced Affect Response Scale in the 1980s, a method for measuring how infants and young children respond to adult emotional expressions, and used it to show that ten-week-old infants already respond differentially to distinct adult displays. The finding mattered because it was a behavioural answer to a question that had been settled only by assertion: whether very young infants have differentiated emotional responses at all, or only diffuse distress and contentment. Her parallel work with Carol Malatesta on the socialization of display rules asked the complementary question — how mothers, responding differently to the emotional expressions of sons and daughters, begin to produce the gender differences in expressiveness that are measurable within the first two years.

Academic and Professional Career

Haviland-Jones spent her career at Rutgers, where she is now Professor Emerita of Psychology. In the 1990s she established the Human Emotions Lab, approaching emotion as a dynamic system that shapes thought, behavior, health, and well-being rather than as a set of discrete states. She co-directs the Center for Sensory Science and Innovation and formerly directed the Human Emotions Lab, and she served as vice chair for undergraduate education in a psychology department with roughly 1,200 majors. She is also active in undergraduate science education reform, having redesigned adolescent psychology as a course built around civic scientific questions — a shift from teaching findings to teaching students to evaluate them, which is easier to describe than to do in a class of that size.

Her editorial work made her one of the field's gatekeepers. She co-edited the first two editions of the Handbook of Emotions with Michael Lewis, the third with Lewis and Lisa Feldman Barrett, and the fourth with Barrett and Lewis; the fourth edition was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and remains the field's comprehensive reference. That sequence is itself a small history of the field: across four editions and three decades, the Handbook moved from a volume organized around discrete emotion categories to one in which the discreteness assumption was contested by one of its own editors.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Emotional development across the lifespan

Her program traced how emotional displays change from infancy through old age, how gender differences in emotional expression develop, and how emotion organizes cognition and personality. With Carol Magai she developed the theoretical framing of this work in The Hidden Genius of Emotion: Lifespan Transformations of Personality, which treats emotional traits as adaptive reorganizations across the life course rather than as fixed dispositions: what looks like a temperamental shift in later life is often an emotion system re-tuning itself to new circumstances — a narrower social world, different physical capacities, a different time horizon. The book's argument was that personality change across adulthood makes better sense as emotional adaptation than as decline or as the late working-out of childhood.

Dynamic systems and developmental emotion science

In a widely cited commentary with Arlene Walker-Andrews in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, she argued that dynamic systems approaches to emotion must incorporate a developmental perspective. The paper used stranger fear in infancy, intermodal perception of emotion, and the development of individual emotional systems as cases where a purely adult-centered systems account is incomplete: a system that has assembled itself over months cannot be described by the equations that describe it once assembled.

Olfactics: the chemical channel

The second half of her career focused on what she called olfactics, the chemosensory aspects of emotional communication. The claim is that semiochemicals, including fragrances, odorants, pheromones, and body odors, influence mood, attitude, memory, reaction time, social behavior, and well-being, and therefore constitute a channel of emotion transmission alongside face and voice. The strong version of the claim — that humans, like other mammals, emit and detect chemical signals carrying emotional state — was regarded as implausible when she began, and her lab's contribution was to insist that it was an empirical question rather than an embarrassment.

Flowers as an environmental emotion inducer

The best-known study from this program, published in Evolutionary Psychology in 2005 with Holly Hale Rosario, Patricia Wilson, and Terry McGuire, reported three experiments. In the first, 147 women received a mixed-flower bouquet, a basket of fruit and sweets, or a decorative candle; every recipient of flowers produced a Duchenne smile, compared with roughly 90 percent for fruit and 77 percent for candles, and they reported improved mood three days later. In the second, people handed a single gerbera daisy in an elevator, rather than a pen, stood closer to strangers and initiated more conversation. In the third, adults aged 55 and over who received flowers showed improved mood and better episodic memory. Her explanation was co-evolutionary: cultivated flowers, she proposed, have been selected to induce positive emotion in humans quickly, making them the "pets" of the plant world, since humans have propagated them for at least five thousand years.

Major Publications

Haviland, J. M., & Lelwica, M. (1987). "The induced affect response: 10-week-old infants' responses to three emotion expressions." Developmental Psychology, 23(1), 97–104.
Malatesta, C. Z., & Haviland, J. M. (1982). "Learning display rules: The socialization of emotion expression in infancy." Child Development, 53(4), 991–1003.
Lewis, M., & Haviland-Jones, J. M. (Eds.). (1993). Handbook of Emotions. Guilford Press. — The first of four editions she co-edited.
Haviland-Jones, J. M., & Magai, C. (2000). The Hidden Genius of Emotion: Lifespan Transformations of Personality. Cambridge University Press.
Walker-Andrews, A. S., & Haviland-Jones, J. M. (2005). "A dynamic duo: Emotion and development." Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(2), 221–222.
Haviland-Jones, J., Rosario, H. H., Wilson, P., & McGuire, T. (2005). "An environmental approach to positive emotion: Flowers." Evolutionary Psychology, 3(1), 104–132.
Barrett, L. F., Lewis, M., & Haviland-Jones, J. M. (Eds.). (2016). Handbook of Emotions (4th ed.). Guilford Press.

Impact and Legacy

Haviland-Jones helped make emotion a legitimate lifespan topic at a time when developmental psychology was dominated by cognition, and she opened a research area, human chemical communication of emotion, that had been dismissed as implausible. The Handbook of Emotions she edited across four editions is where the field defines itself, and the flower studies have been unusually widely read outside academia — which is itself part of the problem, since a finding that enters popular culture as "flowers make people happy" is no longer accompanied by its caveats.

Both of her signature programs have substantial qualifications attached. The flower findings are striking but rest on small samples with comparison gifts that are not equated for value or surprise; the delivery experimenters who recorded the smiles were not fully separated from the manipulation, and the three-day mood effects come from self-report. The co-evolutionary account, which holds that flowers evolved to manipulate human emotion, is an adaptationist narrative with no direct test, and the authors themselves conceded that no existing theory in any discipline explains the results. It is also worth noting that the most cited replications and extensions in this area come from other laboratories working with different designs.

The chemosensory program inherits the difficulties of the wider fear-chemosignal literature. Effects are typically detectable only at the most ambiguous stimuli or under degraded visual conditions, consistent with the multisensory principle of inverse effectiveness; participants generally cannot consciously distinguish fear samples from happiness samples even though their facial musculature and judgments shift; and the field has produced a mixture of successful and unsuccessful replications, with some investigators interpreting the response as a crude binary alarm rather than a graded signal. A harder version of the objection concerns human pheromones specifically: the existence of a human vomeronasal organ with a functional connection to the brain is disputed, and the claim that human body odors carry emotion in the way that alarm pheromones do in rodents has not been established independently of the small effects it is meant to explain.

The deepest challenge concerns the framework her early work assumed. Her infancy research treated emotions as discrete states with universally readable facial displays, and used the Duchenne smile as a marker of genuine enjoyment. That premise is exactly what the constructionist position advanced by Lisa Feldman Barrett rejects, and Barrett was her co-editor on the third and fourth editions of the Handbook. The 2019 review by Barrett and colleagues in Psychological Science in the Public Interest concluded that facial movements do not map one-to-one onto emotion categories, that the Duchenne marker has been over-interpreted, and that emotional experience and expression are highly variable within any named category. Defenders of the earlier tradition, including work in the facial expression lineage associated with Paul Ekman, reply that reliable above-chance recognition across cultures is itself the phenomenon to be explained, and that variability does not entail the absence of underlying structure.

Haviland-Jones's own position has been closer to the systems view than to the discrete-emotion one for most of her later career, which is one reason her early and late work sit in tension. A fair summary is that she spent decades producing the behavioural evidence for discrete emotional differentiation in infancy, and then helped edit into the field's reference work the argument that the differentiation is messier than the evidence suggested.

Learn More

Lisa Feldman Barrett — whose theory of constructed emotion challenges the discrete-emotion assumption.
Paul Ekman — the basic-emotions theorist whose framework the findings complicate.
Michael Lewis — her Rutgers colleague and collaborator on emotional development.
Body Language — nonverbal behaviour and emotional display.

References

Haviland, J. M., & Lelwica, M. (1987). "The induced affect response: 10-week-old infants' responses to three emotion expressions." Developmental Psychology, 23(1), 97–104.
Malatesta, C. Z., & Haviland, J. M. (1982). "Learning display rules: The socialization of emotion expression in infancy." Child Development, 53(4), 991–1003.
Lewis, M., & Haviland-Jones, J. M. (Eds.). (1993). Handbook of Emotions. Guilford Press.
Haviland-Jones, J. M., & Magai, C. (2000). The Hidden Genius of Emotion: Lifespan Transformations of Personality. Cambridge University Press.
Walker-Andrews, A. S., & Haviland-Jones, J. M. (2005). "A dynamic duo: Emotion and development." Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(2), 221–222.
Haviland-Jones, J., Rosario, H. H., Wilson, P., & McGuire, T. (2005). "An environmental approach to positive emotion: Flowers." Evolutionary Psychology, 3(1), 104–132.
Barrett, L. F., Lewis, M., & Haviland-Jones, J. M. (Eds.). (2016). Handbook of Emotions (4th ed.). Guilford Press.
Barrett, L. F., Adolphs, R., Marsella, S., Martinez, A. M., & Pollak, S. D. (2019). Emotional expressions reconsidered: Challenges to inferring emotion from human facial movements. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 20(1), 1-68.