Introduction: Special Section to Honor Carroll Izard

Biographical Background

Carroll was born in 1923, and grew up on a farm in Mississippi, as the youngest of six children. In an interview with Carol Magai, a former close collaborator, he described his childhood as characterized by a happy sense of freedom, and recalled going horseback riding across the vast country land after helping his mother with household chores in the morning (Magai & McFadden, 1995). Later in life, Carroll attributed his independent spirit and flexibility of mind to his early upbringing. In the preface to Face of Emotions, he wrote:

My father and mother, Willis Lee and Willie Jane Izard, and the country life I enjoyed in boyhood and adolescence, gave me a feeling of personal freedom and independence that contributed most fundamentally to the style of life and thought that produced this book. I consider myself most fortunate that my wife, Barbara Sinquefield, enjoys the same sense of freedom… (Izard, 1971, p. vii)

Intellectually precocious, Carroll entered Mississippi College when he was 16 and Yale Divinity School when he was 19. He characterized his Divinity School days as emotionally tumultuous. Even though he was beginning to question the conservative southern Baptist beliefs of his background by the time he entered divinity school, the intellectually rigorous and liberal environment at Yale hastened the process and slowly led him to move from a religious to an academic vocation. As a Divinity student, he took graduate courses in psychology and went on to obtain his PhD in Clinical Psychology at Syracuse University. After serving on the faculty at Vanderbilt University for 15 years, he moved to the University of Delaware to become Unidel Professor and then the Trustees Distinguished Professor.

Contributions to the Special Section

The opening article to the special section is by Dante Cicchetti, who was the keynote speaker at the Festschrift held at the University of Delaware to celebrate Carroll’s life and career in October 2012. As one of the pioneers in the field of developmental psychopathology who has had a longstanding friendship with Carroll, no one is better qualified or poised than Dante to present a historical overview of Carroll’s career and to discuss its multidisciplinary nature (Cicchetti, 2015). His moving tribute conveys the deep respect and affection he has for Carroll as a scholar and a man, and we can attest that Carroll shared these feelings. The first author recalls Carroll mentioning that there are many people who are very knowledgeable about developmental psychology and also many people who are very knowledgeable about clinical psychology, but that there are very few people who are very knowledgeable about both disciplines. He then added: “No one knows more about both developmental and clinical psychology than Dante!”

Dante’s article is followed by two articles that focus on the two controversial topics for which Carroll is probably the most well-known, namely, basic emotions theory and the ontogeny of facial expressions. There have been special sections of journals devoted to both of these topics as well as a recent book that explored the categorical versus dimensional views of emotions in-depth (Zachar & Ellis, 2013). Instead of repeating the arguments and evidence in support of the differing perspectives, we sought to shed new light on these topics. To this end, we invited Jaak Panksepp, another eminent basic theorist (Tracy & Randles, 2011) to comment on Carroll’s contributions to the field of emotions. In a spirited article, Jaak, who is considered by many to be the father of modern affective neuroscience, highlights some striking parallels between Carroll’s multitiered view of emotions and his own (Panksepp, 2015). What is remarkable about the convergence between their perspectives is that Jaak’s model was derived from research on cross-species neuroscience, whereas Carroll’s differential emotions theory (DET) was elaborated mainly in the context of developmental research.

Pamela Cole and Ginger Moore’s article sheds refreshing new light on the controversy over the morphology and significance of infant facial expressions (Cole & Moore, 2015). In a highly creative piece that synthesizes research from diverse areas of psychology, they introduce the novel concept of “facial babbling” to reconcile DET with the functionalist and dynamic systems perspectives. We hope that this article will serve as a catalyst to move the field beyond contentious views and to stimulate new research on infant facial expressions.

While Carroll’s contributions to basic emotions theory and our understanding of facial expressions are profound, he viewed these as but aspects of his theory. In a recent article on basic emotions, he stated: “what I have written about basic emotions is at most a small part of my conceptual framework of differential emotions theory (DET)” (Izard, 2011, p. 371). Similarly, in a book chapter on facial expressions he stated: “preoccupation with facial expressions detracted so much from the central themes of DET” (Izard, 1997, p. 63). DET is as much about motivation as it is about structure. In an early formulation of DET, Carroll posited five “assumptions”: (a) 10 fundamental emotions exist (he later reduced this to six; Izard, 2007); (b) each basic emotion has unique motivational and phenomenological properties; (c) each basic emotion tends to motivate somewhat different sets of behavior; (d) emotions may activate or attenuate each other; and (e) emotion processes influence perception, cognition, and motor behaviors (Izard, 1977). In a reformulation of DET two decades later, several of Carroll’s seven “principles” focused more specifically on adaptive and maladaptive functioning. For example, he restates his lifelong position that basic emotions largely motivate adaptive functioning, particularly in response to survival risk, but he also increasingly emphasizes that through connections with specific cognitive patterns and behaviors, they can lead to adaptive “emotion utilization” or potentially maladaptive “emotion schemas” (Izard, 2009).

The development of the preceding concepts reflects Carroll’s consistent interest throughout his career in how emotions and emotion processes influence development, personality, and psychopathology. The next four articles of the special section focus specifically on Carroll’s contribution in these areas. What set DET apart from other major theories of emotion proposed during the 1960s and 1970s was its developmental emphasis (Magai, 2008). Ross Thompson’s article articulates extremely well Carroll’s place in and contributions to the burgeoning developmental science of the 1970s and 1980s (Thompson, 2015). Within an intellectual climate that tended to focus on how behaviors and cognitions accounted for emotional experience, Carroll and others dared to turn the tables and view emotional experiences as organizing and motivational.

The article by Jo Ann Abe, a graduate student during the early 1990s, adopts a more lifespan perspective and seeks to highlight Carroll’s contribution to understanding the role of emotions in personality development (Abe, 2015). Over the years, as Carroll incorporated findings from diverse lines of research, his perspective on personality development evolved and became more comprehensive, articulated, and multileveled. However, he has not presented an integrative summary of his current views on personality development in a single publication. This article seeks to synthesize his insights on personality development from his writings on various topics and explores how DET can be used as a framework for organizing research on personality development across the lifespan.

Eric Youngstrom, a graduate student during the mid 1990s, focuses on psychopathology and provides a delightful account of the historical context within which Carroll first studied psychology and wrote (Youngstrom, 2015). Eric’s focus on psychopathology reflects Carroll’s first empirical interest; in his doctoral dissertation at Syracuse University in the early 1950s, Carroll examined the facial perceptions of adults with and without schizophrenia. Carroll returned to this interest in emotions and emotion processes in psychopathology and developmental psychopathology throughout his career.

The concluding article by Chris Trentacosta and Dave Schultz, two of Carroll’s graduate students in the late 1990s and early 2000s, points out that Carroll was one of the first to make individual differences in children’s emotion processes (e.g., accurate facial emotion recognition) a construct of empirical interest, which heralded the interest in “emotional intelligence” and “emotion competence” that began in the 1990s (Trentacosta & Schultz, 2015). They also describe the impressive transformation Carroll made in the late 1990s and 2000s. After 50 years of basic science, Carroll became a model for translational science by developing the Emotions Curriculum, a set of lessons for preschool children based on ideas from his theoretical and empirical work.

Personal Freedom and Independence

As one will glean from the contributions, a couple of special traits that Carroll possesses that have served him well are an independent spirit and remarkable flexibility of thought. Early in his career, he did not shy away from swimming upstream against an intellectual culture dominated by behavioral and cognitive determinism; later, in the face of empirical evidence, he did not hesitate to revise some of the basic tenets of DET for which he was most well-known; and, after great productivity and success as a basic scientist for five decades, he transformed himself into a prevention scientist.

Carroll also freely crossed the boundaries between disciplines and synthesized vast amounts of information in his theoretical writings. Early in his career, Carroll was deeply influenced by the seminal ideas of his mentor Silvan Tomkins, but he continued to refine, elaborate, and revise his views about emotions as he incorporated new theories and data from a wide range of disciplines. His theoretical writings draw not only from the latest research in psychological science but also quotes and insights from philosophers and the classics. In his tribute, Jaak mentions that Carroll is one of the few emotion researchers who have shown an open-minded attitude about the relevance of cross-species neuroscientific research for understanding human emotions (Panksepp, 2015).

Carroll not only freely crossed the boundaries between disciplines but also between the science and practice of psychology. After completing his clinical training, he went on to qualify as a Diplomate of the American Board of Examiners in Professional Psychology (ABEPP) and served as the clinical director at Vanderbilt University. In his interview with Carol Magai, Carroll explained why he felt drawn to the scientific aspects of psychology and did not remain with clinical psychology:

I think I saw its limitations. (P)sychotherapy had to be about people’s emotions in one way or another … And the time I was trying to practice psychotherapy—in the late fifties—there was just no scientific base whatsoever for talking to people about emotions. (Magai & McFadden, 1995, p. 148)

In many respects, his focus on intervention research towards the end of his career represents a return to his early humanitarian interests, and his career coming to a full circle.

Concluding Remarks

Both of us had the honor and privilege of working with Carroll relatively late in his career. He is considered one of the pioneers in the field of emotions, but he always referred to himself as a “student of emotions” and continued to seek out new avenues for extending his inquiry into emotions. His open-mindedness, energy, and enthusiasm were infectious. He became excited about his students’ ideas as if they were his own and in the process fostered a sense of freedom and independence in us. We hope that Carroll’s spirit comes through in these articles and will serve as an inspiration to a new generation of emotionscientists.