Dr. Jolie Baumann Wormwood received dual bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and psychology from Ithaca College in 2007 before completing her doctorate in psychology at Northeastern University in 2012. Her research examines how affect and emotion guide perception and decision making, with a particular focus on experience and behavior in stressful or threatening contexts. She is dedicated to understanding both the underlying causes and the real-world implications of emotion’s influence on perception and decision making and has adopted an interdisciplinary approach to do so. She utilizes techniques from vision science to study how affect may shape visual perception and peripheral psychophysiological measures to assess associations among bodily activity (e.g., changes in heart rate or sweat gland activity), affective experience and behavior. In addition, she is interested in examining the complexly-determined emotional responses and threat-perception ramifications of exposure to real-world threats, such as incidents of mass violence. For example, she has studied how the Boston Marathon bombings influenced Boston community members’ perceptions of potentially threatening people and objects, as well as how their initial emotional responses to the terrorist event predicted later mental health outcomes. Dr. Wormwood’s research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences.
Courses Taught
- PSYC 402: Statistics in Psychology
- PSYC 595: Applications of Psychology
- PSYC 791W: SpcTop/Emotion & Embodied Mind
- PSYC 894: Advanced Research
- PSYC 907: Resrch Methodology & Stats III
- PSYC 954: Adv Sem/Social Psychology
Research Interests
- Affect
- Cardiovascular System
- Cognition
- Decision making
- Emotion
- Psychology
- Psychophysiology
- Social Psychology
Selected Publications
Wake, S., Wormwood, J., & Satpute, A. B. (2020). The influence of fear on risk taking: a meta-analysis. COGNITION & EMOTION, 34(6), 1143-1159. doi:10.1080/02699931.2020.1731428
Hoemann, K., Khan, Z., Feldman, M. J., Nielson, C., Devlin, M., Dy, J., . . . Quigley, K. S. (2020). Context-aware experience sampling reveals the scale of variation in affective experience. SCIENTIFIC REPORTS, 10(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-020-69180-y
Wormwood, J. B., Khan, Z., Siegel, R., Lynn, S. K., Dy, J., Barrett, L. F., & Quigley, A. S. (2019). Physiological indices of challenge and threat: A data-driven investigation of autonomic nervous system reactivity during an active coping stressor task. PSYCHOPHYSIOLOGY, 56(12). doi:10.1111/psyp.13454
Wormwood, J. B., Siegel, E. H., Kopec, J., Quigley, K. S., & Barrett, L. F. (2019). You Are What I Feel: A Test of the Affective Realism Hypothesis. EMOTION, 19(5), 788-798. doi:10.1037/emo0000484
Siegel, E. H., Wormwood, J. B., Quigley, K. S., & Barrett, L. F. (2018). Seeing What You Feel: Affect Drives Visual Perception of Structurally Neutral Faces. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE, 29(4), 496-503. doi:10.1177/0956797617741718
Chanes, L., Wormwood, J. B., Betz, N., & Barrett, L. F. (2018). Facial Expression Predictions as Drivers of Social Perception. JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, 114(3), 380-396. doi:10.1037/pspa0000108
Wormwood, J. B., Neumann, A. E., Barrett, L. F., & Quigley, K. S. (2017). Understanding emotion in context: how the Boston marathon bombings altered the impact of anger on threat perception. JOURNAL OF APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, 47(1), 13-22. doi:10.1111/jasp.12412
Wormwood, J. B., Lynn, S. K., Barrett, L. F., & Quigley, K. S. (2016). Threat perception after the Boston Marathon bombings: The effects of personal relevance and conceptual framing. COGNITION & EMOTION, 30(3), 539-549. doi:10.1080/02699931.2015.1010487
Lynn, S. K., Wormwood, J. B., Barrett, L. F., & Quigley, K. S. (2015). Decision making from economic and signal detection perspectives: development of an integrated framework. FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY, 6. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00952
DeSteno, D., Breazeal, C., Frank, R. H., Pizarro, D., Baumann, J., Dickens, L., & Lee, J. J. (2012). Detecting the Trustworthiness of Novel Partners in Economic Exchange. PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE, 23(12), 1549-1556. doi:10.1177/0956797612448793
Baumann, J., & DeSteno, D. (2012). Context Explains Divergent Effects of Anger on Risk Taking. EMOTION, 12(6), 1196-1199. doi:10.1037/a0029788
Baumann, J., & DeSteno, D. (2010). Emotion Guided Threat Detection: Expecting Guns Where There Are None. JOURNAL OF PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, 99(4), 595-610. doi:10.1037/a0020665