About Me

*image credit: Jocelyn Glatzer

I am a philosopher of mind, psychology, and cognitive science.  I specialize in empirically-informed theories of skill, know-how and emotion.

As a licensed mental health counselor (LMHC), I work with adults, parents and couples using a multidisciplinary approach combining relational, attachment and evidence-based methods.

Senior Visiting Research Fellow
King's College London              
Department of Philosophy   
Strand
WC2R 2LS London
UK 

Outpatient Clinician
The Brookline Center for Community Mental Health
41 Garrison Rd
Brookline, MA 02445
​USA

[email protected]
​[email protected]
[email protected]

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Research

I'm currently thinking about the relational nature of emotion from a developmental, evolutionary, and neurobiological perspective. On this account, a key function of emotions is to maintain, sustain, and organize relationships. Central to my theory of emotion is the role that coregulation plays in the construction of affective states. This conception of emotion holds that emotions are shaped through repeated coregulated interactions with attachment figures and explains how relationships get into the body.

My research has also focused on skill, mostly of the embodied kind. I have developed an account of motor skill, which highlights several different kinds of control that are involved in skillful actions (strategic, attention, and motor). This account entails that many automatic processes qualify as intelligent.

I've also worked on an account of how skill learning and conceptual thought might be related,  on the connection between skills and early perceptual processing, on how skills are not reducible to propositional thought and, more recently, on the value of emotional self-knowledge.