Alice M. Isen was an American psychologist and Professor of Psychology and of Marketing at Cornell University. A prominent and widely published scholar, her research concerned the influence of "positive affect" on social interaction, thought processes, and decision making, including applications to organizational behavior, medical decision making, doctor-patient interaction, issues in services marketing, and issues related to brand equity and loyalty.

Background

Isen received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1968, an MA in Psychology also from Stanford in 1966, and a BA in Russian Language and Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1963. According to Fredrickson:"Isen’s dissertation, chaired by Walter Mischel and published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, tested her intuition-based hypotheses regarding the “warm glow of success.” Using clever behavioral measures, she found that people randomly assigned to experience success were more generous, helpful, and attentive to others, relative to those randomly assigned to experience failure or to receive no performance feedback whatsoever."She taught at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County 1972–1989, then joined Cornell as the SC Johnson Professor of Marketing and Professor of Psychology. Alice served as Editor of the peer-reviewed Springer journal Motivation and Emotion and a member of the editorial board of other psychology and marketing journals, and a member of the executive committee of the Society for Consumer Psychology. She died on February 29, 2012.

Works

Isen is known for her work on positive emotions. Along with a group of researchers she conducted a series of experiments that show how these emotions have effects on decision-making. Isen found that positive emotions facilitate creativity, successful problem-solving and negotiation, as well as thoroughness and efficiency during the decision-making process. Her work on this particular area has been applied to different fields such as medical diagnosis (e.g. facilitating memory retrieval, organizational efficiency).

Major recent publications

Peer-reviewed journal articles

Incompleto

Book chapters