معرفی
Heather Lench is a Professor and Senior Associate Vice President for Faculty Affairs at Texas A&M University, serving as the Interim Head of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Her research focuses on the foundational role of emotional processes in decision-making, forecasting, and well-being. She investigates how emotions like boredom, anger, and awe influence cognitive functions and behavioral outcomes. Notably, her work addresses affective forecasting biases and the functional benefits of emotions in personal and societal contexts. Dr. Lench’s contributions include a monograph on emotion functions and collaborations on meta-analyses of facial feedback and awe elicitation studies. She currently oversees faculty development initiatives and advises on academic policies at Texas A&M.
Research Interests: Emotional processes in future thinking, decision-making, boredom dynamics, political emotion, and the functional utility of emotions. Affiliations include the Personality Processes and Affective Science research clusters at Texas A&M.
Publications span high-impact journals like Psychological Bulletin and Emotion, with recent work exploring voter emotions, medical residency stress, and pandemic-related boredom. Her lab emphasizes empirical rigor and interdisciplinary collaboration.
