For distinguished contributions to psychophysiology: Margaret M. Bradley

Field: Psychology (Social Sciences)

When Margaret Bradley left her large family (parents plus 12 siblings) in Chicago in 1973to study psychology at St. Norbert College in DePere, Wisconsin, she was already gifted with several qualities that were to help form a future brilliant scientist: a quick and agile mind open to new ideas and experiences, the self-confidence of an eldest sister, and the capacity to take on difficult tasks and to see them through to fruition. In addition to these intellectual abilities, she had at her disposal the emotional skills that are important for a successful scientist. Having helped her mother cope with an ever-expanding family, she developed an extremely caring personality. All of these strengths greatly contributed to my happy experience as a new postdoc when we met several years later at the University of Florida, a time that I remember with great pleasure when we worked together in the Gainesville psychophysiology laboratory. After Margaret received her Bachelor of Science degree in 1977, she was accepted into the PhD program in Experimental Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison by David Grant, long-time editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology, to work on his seminal studies of eyelid conditioning. His death shortly after she arrived led to her work on human episodic learning and memory with Arthur Glenberg, with whom she received master's and doctoral degrees in Experimental Psychology. By 1979, she had published her first paper entitled “Mental contiguity” in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, followed by other papers on comprehension, rehearsal, and memory performance (e.g., Bradley & Glenberg, 1983) and was well on her way to becoming a hard-nosed scientist in experimental (cognitive) psychology. Fortunately for the field of psychophysiology, Peter Lang, a former professor in clinical psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was in need of an outstanding cognitive postdoc from Wisconsin to join the Center for Psychophysiological Research he was developing at the University of Florida in Gainesville, prompting a long-term, remarkably fruitful collaboration for both of them. It was a few years later that I first met Margaret, and I still vividly remember arriving in the United States for the first time, where she helped me and my wife get settled in every way in Gainesville. In the lab, I was soon highly impressed by her intellect and technical skills. She was among the first to eagerly embrace desktop computers to control experiments at a time when we were still suffering from the heat of the big PDP 11 machines. She was critical in developing the then wholly novel startle probe experiments in which acoustic and visual probes were presented during emotional picture viewing. Her programming and design skills were outstanding, and this research bears the mark of her exceptional skills in experimental research. Brilliant ideas were popping up in her brain every week, and, what was even more impressive, she readily transferred them into experimental paradigms that have become models for the field. My career and that of recent SPR president Chris Patrick, who was then also in Gainesville as a postdoc, were forever profoundly influenced by Margaret, as were those of numerous postdocs and graduate students from across the globe whom she trained after us, and with whom she has published hundreds of subsequent studies at the UF Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention (CSEA). Her productivity was quite amazing, and just a few of her seminal papers from that period are “Pictures as prepulse: Attention and emotion in startle modification” (Bradley, Cuthbert, & Lang, 1993); “Emotion, novelty, and the startle reflex: Habituation in humans” (Bradley, Lang, & Cuthbert, 1993); “Measuring emotion: The Self-Assessment Manikin and the semantic differential” (Bradley & Lang, 1994). Each of these can be reread now with great profit. A study published in Psychophysiology, entitled “Startle reflex modification: Emotion or attention” (Bradley, Cuthbert, & Lang, 1990), was a landmark paper investigating attentional and emotional modulation of the startle response, and she continued to pursue creative studies of attention and emotion in reflex research, culminating in a new theoretical account in “A multi-process account of startle modulation during affective perception” (Bradley, Codispoti, & Lang, 2006). Around 2000, the Gainesville lab took a new avenue utilizing ERP methodology to address the relationship between emotion and attention (it is amazing to now recall how difficult it was to publish the first study on the enhanced late positive potential evoked by emotional pictures—a phenomenon now actively pursued by a host of psychophysiologists in our Society). Margaret was instrumental in moving this new research rapidly forward, again deploying her incredible methodological competence and her theoretical sophistication in cognitive science, cleverly separating effects of emotion and picture composition (Bradley, Hamby, Loew, & Lang, 2007). Anybody who really wants to learn the foundational relationships linking orienting and emotion using ERPs as well as peripheral psychophysiological measures must read her seminal presidential address: “Natural selective attention: Orienting and emotion” (Bradley, 2009), published, of course, in Psychophysiology. In this address—as an extra bonus—she delivers a compelling historical tour of the psychophysiological study of orienting, attention, and emotion, together with new insights and links that provide a road map for further study. In psychophysiology, we sometimes tend to build our expertise on a particular recording method, defining ourselves as ERP experts, or startle experts, or skin conductance experts. When one looks at Margaret Bradley's bibliography (see supporting information Appendix S1), however, you see a polymath who is expert in almost any psychophysiological measure one can think of—her studies form a foundation for those measuring the startle reflex, heart rate, skin conductance, facial EMG, ERPs, and fMRI. When Margaret began experimental work using fMRI, for instance, early in the methods development, her approach was very much in the best tradition of psychophysiology. She did not begin with complex paradigms, searching for patterns of brain activation that might spontaneously emerge. Instead, initial experiments presented flickering checkerboards to define patterns of activation in primary and secondary visual processing areas, and only after developing a sound understanding of this new tool was it then exploited in psychological studies of complex image perception, significantly advancing our understanding of emotional factors in perception (Bradley et al., 2003). Her fMRI research now spans studies of emotional perception, imagery, anticipation, and memory, again providing foundational data for her translational studies that have included studies of the anxiety and mood disorders, Parkinson's disease, and pain. More recently, she has once again expanded her expertise to include pupil diameter and eye tracking measures, and her study “The pupil as a measure of emotional arousal and autonomic activation” (Bradley, Miccoli, Escrig, & Lang, 2008) now forms the foundation for modern investigations of pupil dynamics and emotion. As usual, she is at the forefront, developing and refining paradigms and ideas about the pupil diameter and eye movements that will prove invaluable in translational research. Given the excellence of her work, it is not surprising that Margaret served as an associate editor of Psychophysiology from 1994 to 2002 and was editor-in-chief from 2003 to 2006. She has served on the Board of Directors, innumerable SPR committees, and was elected president in 2002, all of which demonstrate her committed and constant presence in SPR. Notably, Margaret is among the youngest scientists to receive this award and will undoubtedly continue to add significantly to her stellar contributions in basic and translational psychophysiological research in the future. Her insightful, programmatic, forever passionate scientific spirit are core virtues of the outstanding contributors to our field, and this creative scientist unreservedly merits the highest honor our Society can bestow, for outstanding Distinguished Contributions to Psychophysiology. Appendix S1 Publications—Margaret M. Bradley Please note: The publisher is not responsible for the content or functionality of any supporting information supplied by the authors. Any queries (other than missing content) should be directed to the corresponding author for the article.