Robert Levenson

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Department of Psychology

Dementia caregivers are at heightened risk for developing mental and physical health problems. Interventions designed to protect caregiver health often create additional demands on time and energy (e.g., exercise programs). Technology-based interventions (e.g., remote monitoring) can be effective, scalable, and do not add greatly to caregiver burde...

Understanding other people’s emotions accurately (i.e., empathic accuracy) is thought to be critical for building and maintaining social connections. Past research suggests empathic skills change with age, but few studies examine age differences in empathic accuracy within the context of close relationships. We examined whether empathic accuracy is...

Caregivers for people with dementia or mild cognitive impairment often report sleep problems due to heightened vigilance concerning worrisome behaviors (e.g., falls, wandering) by their care recipients (CRs). Interventions are needed to help alleviate these issues and the associated sleep troubles for caregivers. One promising approach is to utiliz...

Neurodegenerative diseases lead to deficits in cognitive functioning that could disrupt the ability to perceive others’ emotions. We examined whether cognitive deficits in semantic knowledge and executive function relate to two aspects of emotion perception. Individuals with frontotemporal dementia and healthy controls (N = 110; 33 behavioral varia...

Background The research community has historically failed to enroll diverse groups of participants in dementia clinical trials. A unique aspect of dementia care research is the requirement of a study partner, who can attest to the care recipient’s clinical and functional capacity. The aim of this study is to assess racial and ethnic differences and...

Background: The research community has historically failed to enroll diverse groups of participants in dementia clinical trials. A unique aspect of dementia care research is the requirement of a study partner, who can attest to the care recipient’s clinical and functional capacity. The aim of this study is to assess racial and ethnic differences an...

Introduction: Providing care for a loved one with dementia can engender intense emotions that contribute to symptoms of anxiety and depression. Caregivers often attempt to regulate their emotions using strategies like cognitive reappraisal (CR; changing how they think about the situation) or expressive suppression (ES; hiding their emotions). Howe...

Caring for a person with dementia (PWD) can produce declines in caregivers’ emotional well-being and physical functioning, which could result from disruptions in the emotional linkage between PWDs and caregivers. We examined the effects of interpersonal linkage in emotional behaviors on emotional well-being and physical functioning in caregivers an...

Background As the disease progresses, people with dementia (PWDs) gradually lose their ability to conduct activities of daily living (ADLs) independently and increasingly rely on family caregivers (CGs) for assistance and support. This can lead to CGs experiencing increased burden. These dyadic processes may be manifested by (a) CGs’ increased phys...

Background The research community has historically failed to enroll diverse populations in dementia clinical trials. A unique aspect of dementia care research is the requirement of a study partner, who can attest to the care recipient’s clinical and functional capacity. The aim of this study is to assess racial and ethnic differences and the import...

Emotional impairments are a common symptom of neurodegenerative disorders that can be devastating for persons with the dementia (PWDs) and family members who provide care (i.e., caregivers). Emotional functioning can be well characterized and quantified using laboratory assessments of behavioral, physiological, and self-reported responses to emotio...

There are striking differences among caregivers of people with dementia (PWDs) in how their health and well-being changes during active caregiving; however, less is known about these differences after caregiving has ended. One important factor influencing caregiver health is the emotional quality of the caregiver-PWD relationship. The present study...

Persons with neurodegenerative diseases (PWDs) often develop profound declines in the ability to recognize emotions in others that lead to diminished social connectedness with their loved ones. Physiological linkage, which refers to the degree that people’s physiological responses change in coordinated ways, can serve as a proxy measure for social...

As people age, emotions and close social interactions are increasingly important because our social circle tends to shrink. Research on social and emotional aging typically relies on questionnaires and laboratory assessments. However, most emotions and social behaviors occur in naturalistic and interpersonal contexts. Advances in modern technologie...

Lower income in familial caregivers has been shown to associate with increased distress, depression, and burden during active caregiving. However, findings are less clear on whether lower income associates with changes in well-being that occur after caregiving ends. To investigate this question further, we recruited familial caregivers (CGs) of peo...

Empathic accuracy, the ability to accurately understand other people’s emotions, is typically viewed as beneficial for mental health. However, empathic accuracy may be problematic when a close relational partner is depressed because it promotes shared depression. Across two studies, we measured empathic accuracy using laboratory tasks that capture...

Objectives Dementia caregivers (CGs) are at heightened risk for developing problems with anxiety and depression. Much attention has been directed toward developing and deploying interventions designed to protect CG health, but few have been supported by rigorous empirical evidence. Technology-based interventions that are effective, scalable, and do...

Dementia caregiving, besides encompassing various challenges in tandem to the diagnosis of the care recipient, is associated with decreased psychological well-being and mental health. Accordingly, caregivers’ wellbeing has an impact on the quality of care they provide and on the relationship quality with the person in their care. The aim of the pre...

Dementia caregivers can experience negative affect when interacting with their care recipients. However, few studies have examined the specific factors that predict caregiver negative affect in this dyadic context. We hypothesized that deficits in care recipients’ emotional functioning would be associated with increased intensity of caregivers’ neg...

Emotional interactions may change as a result of dementia and negatively impact caregivers’ mental health. We examined 62 dementia caregivers’ emotional experiences during conflict with their partners, including 22 individuals with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), 20 with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and 20 with a language variant o...

Behavioral-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) is characterized by impairment in socioemotional functioning. Spouses caring for individuals with bvFTD often experience profound health/well-being declines, compared to Alzheimer’s disease (AD) caregivers and non-caregiving older adults. We hypothesized that disrupted positive emotional connection...

Caregivers (CGs) of a family member with dementia often experience increased loneliness, which can result from reduced social interactions and increased physical distancing associated with care recipient’s (CR) disease progression. Through a university-industry collaboration, we developed new technology for measuring physical distance remotely. CGs...

In response to the COVID‐19 pandemic, mandated state lockdowns in the U.S. profoundly changed day‐to‐day life for many individuals providing informal care for a person with dementia or mild cognitive impairment. The present study explored changes in caregiver burden, depression, and anxiety associated with lockdown. We used questionnaire data colle...

Mental health problems are common for persons with neurological disorders (PWNDs) and their caregivers (CGs) but often are not adequately treated. Despite this growing need, the training of clinical psychologists typically does not include coursework or practicum experience working with these populations. To address this, a team of faculty, supervi...

Objectives: Heavy demands upon dementia caregivers can lead to a number of poor health outcomes including declines in physical, mental, and brain health. Although dementia affects people from all backgrounds, research in the US has largely focused on European American caregivers. This has made providing culturally-competent care more difficult. Th...

Aim: The current study examined whether visual attention to emotional facial expressions is lower in individuals with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) compared to healthy controls, and whether visual attention to emotional facial expressions is associated with the ability to perceive others' emotional valence accurately. Methods: Participants with...

Objective: Emotional reactivity normally involves a synchronized coordination of subjective experience and facial expression. These aspects of emotional reactivity can be uncoupled by neurological illness and produce adverse consequences for patient and caregiver quality of life because of misunderstandings regarding the patient's presumed interna...

Introduction: Family caregivers of persons living with dementia (PLWDs) have extensive social, physical, emotional, and financial responsibilities. However, less is known about the relationship and interpersonal connection between caregivers and PLWDs. We examined caregiver pronoun use, as an index of the connection between the caregiver and PLWD...

Researchers typically study physiological responses either after stimulus onset or when the emotional valence of an upcoming stimulus is revealed. Yet participants may also respond when they are told that an emotional stimulus is about to be presented even without knowing its valence. Increased physiological responding during this time may reflect...

Physiological linkage refers to the degree to which two individuals' central/peripheral physiological activities change in coordinated ways. Previous research has focused primarily on linkage in the autonomic nervous system in laboratory settings, particularly examining how linkage is associated with social behavior and relationship quality. In thi...

The Positivity Resonance Theory of coexperienced positive affect describes moments of interpersonal connection characterized by shared positive affect, caring nonverbal synchrony, and biological synchrony. The construct validity of positivity resonance and its longitudinal associations with health have not been tested. The current longitudinal stud...

Background A smooth turn‐taking transition from one person to the next is an expected part of many conversations. Turn‐taking combines high temporal coordination between participants with the remarkable complexity and open‐endedness of the language and paralanguage that fills the turns. Turn‐taking may therefore serve as a naturally occurring marke...

Research over the past decades has demonstrated the explanatory power of emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes when trying to understand and predict how we think and behave. In this consensus article, we ask: has the increasingly recognized impact of affective phenomena ushered in a new era, the era of affectivism?

Caregiving for a person with dementia or neurodegenerative disease is associated with increased rates of depression and anxiety. As the population ages and dementia prevalence increases worldwide, mental health problems related to dementia caregiving will become an even more pressing public health concern. In the present study, we assessed emotiona...

Motivated by collective emotions theories that propose emotions shared between individuals predict group-level qualities, we hypothesized that co-experienced affect during interactions is associated with relationship quality, above and beyond the effects of individually experienced affect. Consistent with positivity resonance theory, we also hypoth...

Sadness is often thought of as unpleasant and dysfunctional. Yet, evolutionary-functionalist approaches and discrete emotional aging frameworks suggest that sadness is an emotion that helps us deal with loss and thus may become particularly salient and adaptive in late life. This talk presents findings from a multi-study, multi-method research prog...

Dementia caregiving is associated with a variety of negative outcomes including poor caregiver mental and physical health and low relationship satisfaction. Prior research has linked these negative caregiver outcomes to patients’ cognitive and psychiatric symptoms. However, few studies have examined the link between patients’ socioemotional functio...

Physiological linkage refers to the degree to which peoples' physiological responses change in coordinated ways. Here, we examine whether and how physiological linkage relates to incidents of shared emotion, distinguished by valence. Past research has used an "overall average" approach and characterized how physiological linkage over relatively lon...

Subjective emotional experience that is congruent with a given situation (i.e., target emotions) is critical for human survival (e.g., feeling disgusted in response to contaminated food motivates withdrawal behaviors). Neurodegenerative diseases including frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease affect brain regions critical for cognitive an...

COVID-19 presents significant social, economic, and medical challenges. Because COVID-19 has already begun to precipitate huge increases in mental health problems, clinical psychological science must assert a leadership role in guiding a national response to this secondary crisis. In this article, COVID-19 is conceptualized as a unique, compounding...

Introduction: Caring for a spouse with dementia can be extremely challenging. Many caregivers experience profound declines in well-being; however, others remain healthy. Objective: This study determined whether the personal pronouns used in interactions between persons with dementia (PWDs) and their spousal caregivers were associated with caregi...

COVID-19 presents humanity with one of the greatest health and economic crises of the 21st Century. Because COVID-19 has already begun to precipitate a huge increase in mental health problems, we believe that clinical science must also play a leadership role in guiding a national response to this secondary crisis. In this article, we explain why CO...

Deficits in emotion perception (the ability to infer others' emotions accurately) can occur as a result of neurodegeneration. It remains unclear how different neurodegenerative diseases affect different forms of emotion perception. The present study compares performance on a dynamic tracking task of emotion perception (where participants track the...

Objectives: Caregivers of persons with neurodegenerative disease have high rates of mental health problems compared to non-caregiving adults. Emotion regulation may play an important role in preserving caregivers' mental health. We examined the associations between caregivers' emotion regulation measured in several ways (ability, habitual use, and...

Background and objectives: Motivated by the high rates of health problems found among caregivers of persons with neurodegenerative disease, we examined associations between deficits in two aspects of care recipients' socioemotional functioning and their caregivers' health. Research design and methods: In 2 studies with independent samples (N = 1...

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD), a neurodegenerative disease broadly characterized by socioemotional impairments, includes three clinical subtypes: behavioral variant FTD (bvFTD), semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA), and non-fluent variant primary progressive aphasia (nfvPPA). Emerging evidence has shown emotional reactivity impairme...

The growth of clinical science as a field depends on the work of engaged mentors nurturing future generations of scientists. Effective research mentoring has been shown to predict positive outcomes, including greater scholarly productivity, reduced attrition, and increased satisfaction with training and/or employment, which ultimately may enhance t...

Expressive suppression is a response-focused regulatory strategy aimed at concealing the outward expression of emotion that is already underway. Expressive suppression requires the integration of interoception, proprioception, and social awareness to guide behavior in alignment with personal and interpersonal goals-all processes known to involve th...

This book provides an overview of key processes relevant to disturbances in positive valence systems; discusses cutting-edge advances on positive emotion disturbance in key clinical disorders, translational applications, and targeted treatment foci; discusses conceptualizations of psychopathology and models of positive emotion disturbances; and sug...

Objective: Considerable research indicates that individuals with dementia have deficits in the ability to recognize emotion in other people. The present study examined ability to detect emotional qualities of objects. Method: Fifty-two patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), 20 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), 18 patients awaiting su...

Positivity resonance-defined as a synthesis of shared positive affect, mutual care and concern, plus behavioral and biological synchrony-is theorized to contribute to a host of positive outcomes, including relationship satisfaction. The current study examined whether, in long-term married couples, behavioral indices of positivity resonance (rated u...

Research on stress and disease has often afforded an important role to emotion, typically conceptualized in broad categories (e.g., negative emotions), viewed as playing a causal role (e.g., anger contributing to pathophysiology of cardiovascular disease), and measured using self-report inventories. In this article, I argue for the value of evaluat...

Communication accommodation describes how individuals adjust their communicative style to that of their conversational partner. We predicted that interpersonal prosodic correlation related to pitch and timing would be decreased in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). We predicted that the interpersonal correlation in a timing measure...

Visual avoidance of unpleasant stimuli (i.e., strategic positioning of eyes, head and torso away from an environmental stimulus) is a common attentional control behavior that may down-regulate emotion by reducing visual input. Despite its ubiquity, relatively little is known about how visual avoidance is affected by neurological diseases that impac...

Objective: To test the hypothesis that a functional polymorphism of the serotonin transporter gene (serotonin-transporter-linked polymorphic region [5-HTTLPR]), which is thought to be associated with differential environmental sensitivity, moderates the association between low levels of empathic accuracy (i.e., ability to recognize emotions in oth...

Emotion theorists have characterized emotions as involving coherent responding across various emotion response systems (e.g., covariation of subjective experience and physiology). Greater response system coherence has been theorized to promote well-being, yet very little research has tested this assumption. The current study examined whether indivi...

In order to develop more targeted, efficient, and effective psychotherapeutic interventions, calls have been made in the literature for greater use of idiographic hypothesis testing. Idiographic analyses can provide useful information regarding mechanisms of change within individuals over time during treatment. However, it remains unclear how clini...

Responding prosocially to the emotion of others may become increasingly important in late life, especially as partners and friends encounter a growing number of losses, challenges, and declines. Facial expressions are important avenues for communicating empathy and concern, and for signaling that help is forthcoming when needed. In a study of young...

Background: Caregivers of patients with neurodegenerative diseases are at heightened risk for serious health problems, but health differences between individual caregivers abound. Aims: To determine whether atrophy in patient brains could be used to identify caregivers at heightened risk for health problems and which patient variables mediate th...

We examined age-related changes in emotional behavior in a sample of middle-aged and older long-term married couples over a 13-year period. Data were collected at 3 waves, each occurring 5 to 6 years apart. For the present study, only couples who participated in all 3 waves were examined (n = 87). Couples were either in the middle-aged group (40–50...

The publication of the first issue of Cognition & Emotion in 1987 helped open the floodgates to what has become a golden age of emotion research in the social and biological sciences. In this article, I describe the intellectual landscape of that era and trace key developments that helped foster the growth of the field of affective science. Looking...

The salience network is a distributed neural system that maintains homeostasis by regulating autonomic nervous system activity and social-emotional function. Here we examined how within-network connectivity relates to individual differences in human (including males and females) baseline parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous activity. We measured...

Perceiving another person's emotional expression often sparks a corresponding signal in the observer. Shared conversational laughter is a familiar example. Prior studies of shared laughter have made use of task-based functional neuroimaging. While these methods offer insight in a controlled setting, the ecological validity of such controlled tasks...

A sample praat grid labeling laughter. A depiction of how laughs were labeled for each speaker using Praat. Each speaker was represented by one tier for speech (< sp>), and another for nonspeech sounds (e.g., < laugh>). The sample represents an instance where Speaker 2 laughed following speech by Speaker 1. Speaker 1 then joined in that laughter be...

Objective: Providing care for a spouse with dementia is associated with an increased risk for poor mental health. To determine whether this vulnerability in caregivers is related to the expression of positive emotion, we examined 57 patients with Alzheimer's disease and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia and their spouses as they discussed...

Background: Behavioral symptoms in patients with neurodegenerative diseases can be particularly challenging for caregivers. Previously, we reported that patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) experienced emotions that were atypical or incongruent with a given situation (i.e., non-target emotions). Aim: We tested...

Objectives: To investigate whether deficits in empathic accuracy (i.e., ability to recognize emotion in others) in patients with neurodegenerative disease are associated with greater depression in their caregivers. Design: Two cross-sectional studies. Setting: Academic medical center and research university. Participants: Two independent sam...

Anosognosia, or lack of awareness of one's deficits, is a core feature of the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). We hypothesized that this deficit has its origins in failed emotional processing of errors. We studied autonomic and facial emotional reactivity to errors in patients with bvFTD (n = 17), Alzheimer's disease (AD, n =...

The state of psychological science is considered in terms of current issues and suggestions for the future.

Significance In this study, we investigated the role that caregiver mental health plays in patient mortality. In 176 patient–caregiver dyads, we found that worse caregiver mental health predicted greater patient mortality even when accounting for key risk factors in patients (i.e., diagnosis, age, sex, dementia severity, and patient mental health)....

Beginning with efforts in the late 1940s to ensure that clinical psychologists were adequately trained to meet the mental health needs of the veterans of World War II, the accreditation of clinical psychologists has largely been the province of the Commission on Accreditation of the American Psychological Association. However, in 2008 the Psycholog...

Caring for a spouse with dementia can lead to increased health problems in caregivers. The present study examined whether patient deficits in visual avoidance, a common form of emotion regulation, are related to greater psychological distress in caregivers. Participants were 43 Alzheimer disease (AD) patients, 43 behavioral variant frontotemporal d...

Background We performed an observational study of laughter during seminaturalistic conversations between patients with dementia and familial caregivers. Patients were diagnosed with (1) behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), (2) right temporal variant frontotemporal dementia (rtFTD), (3) semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia...

Interpersonal distance is central to communication and complex social behaviors but the neural correlates of interpersonal distance preferences are not defined. Previous studies suggest that damage to the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is associated with impaired interpersonal behavior. To examine whether the OFC is critical for maintaining appropriate...

In this chapter, we review the current state of knowledge about neural and genetic pathways that influence three emotional processes: (1) emotional reactivity, which is generating emotions in response to challenges, threats, and opportunities; (2) emotional regulation, which is adjusting emotional responses to meet personal, interpersonal, and soci...

Objectively coded interpersonal emotional behaviors that emerged during a 15-min marital conflict interaction predicted the development of physical symptoms in a 20-year longitudinal study of long-term marriages. Dyadic latent growth curve modeling showed that anger behavior predicted increases in cardiovascular symptoms and stonewalling behavior p...