Department of Psychology
Department of Psychology
Gerald Clore

Gerald Clore

Professor of Psychology | Emeritus
gclore@virginia.edu
434 982-0449
Research Areas

Office Address: 109B Gilmer Hall

Biography

I study emotion, asking questions about what emotions are, how they arise, and what they are for. In general, emotions are emergent affective states that arise when the same kind of goodness or badness is registered at the same time in multiple embodied ways. Our research examines the roles that affective reactions play in cognition and perception, including attention, judgment, memory, and thought. Much of what people do and decide in everyday life depends on what they feel. And in psychology, many of the textbook phenomena in cognitive psychology turn out to have an affective trigger. Additionally, we are interested in the role of emotion in art and other aesthetic experiences.

Biographical Sketch:

Gerald L. Clore (Phd, Texas: Postdoc, Stanford) is Commonwealth Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and formerly Alumni Distinguished Professor at the University of Illinois. His research focuses on emotion and its cognitive consequences. He co-authored The Cognitive Structure of Emotions, a general theory of how specific emotions represent important psychological situations, and how thoughts intensify them. The theory is applied mainly in computer science to supply the artificial (emotional) intelligence of virtual agents in computer games, interactive training modules, and other programs. Clore’s research concerns the Affect-as-Information hypothesis -- that people’s emotional reactions provide embodied information about the value and urgency of events. That information then regulates cognition, motivation, attention, and memory. Clore has served as Associate Editor of Cognition and Emotion, as core faculty of the NIMH Consortium on Emotion, and as Visiting Professor at Harvard. He has also been a visiting scholar at Harvard, Oxford, and New York University and a Fellow of the Centers for Advanced Study at Illinois and Stanford, and of the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy. In 2010 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2013 he received the William James Award for lifetime scientific achievement from the Association for Psychological Science. 

Publications

Books

  • Martin, L. L. & Clore, G. L. (Eds). (2001). Theories of Mood and Cognition: A User's Guidebook. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  • Ortony, A., Clore, G. L., & Collins, A. (1988). The cognitive structure of emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press (reprinted 1999)

Articles and Chapters: (last 10 years)

  • Clore, G.L. & Schnall, S. (2018). The Influence of affect on attitudes. In D. Albarracín & B. T. Johnson, (Eds.) The handbook of attitudes, 2nd Edition (pp. 359-290). New York, NY: Psychology Press.
  • Clore, G.L. (2018). What is an emotion? In R. Davidson, A. Shackman, A. Fox, & R. Lapate (Eds.), The nature of emotion: A volume of short essays addressing fundamental questions in emotion. Oxford University Press.
  • Clore, G.L. & Reinhard, D. A. (2018). Emotional intensity: It’s the thought that counts. In R. Davidson, A. Shackman, A. Fox, & R. Lapate (Eds.), the nature of emotion: A volume of short essays addressing fundamental questions in emotion. Oxford University Press.
  • Clore, G.L. (2018). The impact of affect depends on its object. In R. Davidson, A. Shackman, A. Fox, & R. Lapate (Eds.), The nature of emotion: A volume of short essays addressing fundamental questions in emotion. Oxford University Press.
  • Clore, G.L., Schiller, A.J., & Shaked, A. (2018). Affect and cognition: Three principles. Current Opinion in Behavioral Science, 19, 78-82. 
  • Clore, G.L. & Robinson, M.D. (2018). Five questions about emotion: Implications for social-personality psychology in Kay Deaux and Mark Snyder (Eds.) Oxford handbook of personality and social psychology (2nd ed.).  Oxford University Press.
  • Clore, G.L. (2016). The nature of emotion and the impact of affect. In R.J. Sternberg, S. T. Fiske, & D. J. Foss (Eds.). Scientists Making a Difference: One Hundred Eminent Behavior and Brain Scientists Talk About Their Most Important Contributions. New York: Cambridge
  • Clore, G.L. & Schiller, A. J. (2016). New light on the affect-cognition connection. In L.F. Barrett, M. Lewis, & J.M. Haviland-Jones (Eds.) The handbook of emotions, 4th Edition (pp. 532-546). New York: Guilford Press.
  • Shaked, A. & Clore, G.L. (2016). Breaking the world to make it whole again: Attribution in the construction of emotion. Emotion Review 9, 27-35. DOI: 10.1177/1754073916658250
  • Clore, G.L. & Proffitt, D.R. (2016). The myth of pure perception. Brain and Behavioral Sciences. 39, 24-25. DOI:10.1017/S0140525X15002551, e235
  • Schwarz, N. & Clore, G.L. (2016). Evaluating psychological research requires more than attention to the N: A comment on Simonsohn’s (2015) “Small telescopes” Psychological Science, 27, 1407-1409. DOI: 10.1177/0956797616653102
  • Schnall1, S., Haidt, J., Clore, G.L., & Jordan, A.H. (2015). Landy and Goodwin (2015) confirmed most of our findings then drew the wrong conclusions. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10, 537–538.  DOI: 10.1177/1745691615589078
  • Huntsinger, J.R., Isbell, L.M., & Clore, G.L. (2014). The Affective control of thought: Malleable, not fixed. Psychological Review. 121, 600-618. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0037669
  • Ortony, A. & Clore, G.L. (2014). Can an appraisal model be compatible with psychological constructionism? In L.F. Barrett & J.R. Russell (Eds.) The psychological construction of emotion (pp. 305-333). New York: Guilford Press.
  • Trammel, J.P. & Clore, G.L. (2014). Does stress enhance or impair memory consolidation? Cognition & Emotion, 28, 361-374. DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2013.822346. PMID- 22082114
  • Clore, G.L. & Ortony, A. (2013). Psychological construction in the OCC model of emotion. Emotion Review. 5, 335–343. DOI: 10.1177/1754073913489751 ISSN 1754-0739
  • Sherman, G.D. & Clore, G.L. (2013). Evaluative metaphors: When goodness is up, bright, and big. In M.J. Landau, M.D. Robinson, & B.P. Meir (Eds.), Metaphorical thought in social life. Washington DC: APA Books.
  • Solak, N., Jost, J.T., Sumer, N., & Clore, G.L. (2012). Rage against the machine: The case for system-level emotions. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 6, 674-690.
  • Sherman, G.D., Haidt, J., & Clore, G.L. (2012). The faintest speck of dirt: Disgust enhances impurity detection. Psychological Science. 23,1506–1514
  • Koo, M., Clore, G.L., Kim, J., & Choi, I. (2012). Affective facilitation and inhibition of cultural influences on reasoning. Cognition and Emotion, 26, 680-689.
  • Clore, G.L. & Robinson, M.D. (2012). Five new ideas about emotion and their implications for social-personality psychology. In K. Deaux & M. Snyder (Eds.) Oxford handbook of personality and social psychology (pp. 315-336). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Clore, G.L. & Robinson, M.D. (2012). Knowing our emotions: How do we know what we feel? In S. Vazire & T.D. Wilson (Eds.). Handbook of self-knowledge (pp. 194-209). New York: Guilford Press.
  • Clore, G.L. (2012). Psychology and the rationality of emotion. In S. Coakley (Ed.) Faith rationality and the passions (pp. 209-222). Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Hunsinger, M., Isbell, L.M., & Clore, G.L. (2012). Sometimes happy people focus on the trees and sad people focus on the forest: Context-dependent effects of mood in impression formation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38, 220-232. DOI: 10.1177/0146167211424166
  • Storbeck, J. & Clore, G.L. (2011). Affect influences false memories at encoding: Evidence from recognition data. Emotion, 11, 981-989.
  • Riener, C.R., Stefanucci, J.K., Proffitt, D.R., & Clore, G.L. (2011). An effect of mood on the perception of geographical slant. Cognition and Emotion, 25,174-182.
  • Huntsinger, J.R. & Clore, G.L. (2011). Emotion and social metacognition. In, P. Briñol and K. DeMarree (Eds.), Social metacognition (pp. 199-217). Psychology Press: New York.
  • Clore, G. L. (2011). Thrilling thoughts: How changing your mind intensifies your emotions. In R. Arkin (Ed.) Most Underappreciated: 50 prominent social psychologists talk about hidden gems (pp. 67-71). New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-977818-8
  • Clore, G. L. (2011). Psychology and the rationality of emotion. Modern Theology, 27, 325-338. ISSN 0266-7177
  • Zadra, J.R. & Clore, G.L. (2011). Emotion and perception: The role of affective information. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science. Chichester, West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons. DOI: 10.1002/wcs.147 PMCID: PMC320302
  • Huntsinger, J.R., Clore, G.L. & Bar-Anan, Y. (2010) Mood and global-local focus: Priming a local focus reverses the link between mood and global-local processing. Emotion, 10, 722-726. PMID: 21038956
  • Clore, G.L. & Palmer, J.E. (2009). Affective guidance of intelligent agents: How emotion controls cognition. Cognitive Systems Research, 10, 22-30. PMCID: PMC2599948
  • Clore, G.L. (2009). Affect as Information. In D. Sander & K. Scherer (Eds). The Oxford companion to emotion and the affective sciences. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Clore, G.L. (2009). The bogus stranger technique for studying interpersonal attraction. In H. Reis & S. Sprecher, (Eds.) The encyclopedia of human relationships (pp. 183-184). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
  • Clore, G.L. (2009). The law as emotion regulation. In Law and Emotion: Re-Envisioning Family Law, Special Issue, Virginia Journal of Social Policy and    Law, 16, 334-345.
  • Huntsinger, J. R., Lun, J., Sinclair, S., & Clore, G. L. (2009). Contagion without contact: Anticipatory mood matching in response to affiliative motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 35, 909-922 PMID: 19487484. 38
  • Stefanucci, J. K., Proffitt, D. R., Clore, G., & Parekh, N. (2008). Skating down a steeper slope: Fear influences the perception of geographical slant. Perception, 37, 321–323. PMCID: PMC2293293
  • Storbeck, J. & Clore, G.L. (2008). Affective arousal as information: How affective arousal influences judgments, learning, and memory. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2, 1824–1843. DOI: 10.1111/j.1751-9004.2008.00138.x
  • Schnall, S., Haidt, J. Clore, G.L., & Jordan, A. H. (2008). Disgust as embodied moral judgment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 1096-1109. PMCID: PMC2562923
  • Centerbar, D.B., Schnall, S., Clore, G.L., & Garvin, E. (2008). Affective incoherence: When affective concepts and embodied reactions clash. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 560–578. PMCID: PMC2365308.
  • Storbeck, J. & Clore, G.L. (2008). The affective regulation of semantic and affective priming. Emotion, 8, 208-215. PMCID: PMC2376275
  • Clore, G. L. & Ortony, A. (2008). Appraisal theories: How cognition shapes affect into emotion. In M. Lewis, J.M. Haviland-Jones, & L.F. Barrett (Eds.). Handbook of emotions, 3rd Ed. (pp. 628-642). New York: Guilford Press.
  • Clore, G.L. (2008). Simultaneity in emotional moments. In S. Vrobel, T. Marks-Tarlow, & O.E. Rossler (Eds.) Simultaneity: Temporal structures and observer perspectives. (pp. 91-108). Singapore: World Scientific.
  • Clore, G. L. & Schnall, S. (2008). Affective coherence: Affect as embodied evidence in attitude, advertising, and art. In G. R. Semin & E. Smith (Eds.) Embodied grounding: Social, cognitive, affective, and neuroscientific approaches (pp. 211-236). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Awards

  • APS William James Award for Lifetime Intellectual Contributions to the Science of Psychology
  • Fellow, American Academy of Arts & Sciences
  • Fellow, Rockefeller Foundation Study Center, Bellagio Italy
  • Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford
  • Fellow, Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois
  • Fellow, Association for Psychological Science
  • Fellow, American Psychological Association
  • Commonwealth Professor of Psychology, University of Virginia
  • Alumni Distinguished Professor of Psychology, University of Illinois