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Director
Kevin Ochsner,
Ph.D.
Kevin received his bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign and his Masters degree and Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University. He has
also received postdoctoral training in social psychology at Harvard and
functional neuroimaging at Stanford University.
He currently is Associate Professor of Psychology at Columbia University.
Kevin's research interests include the psychological and neural processes
involved in emotion, pain, self-regulation, self perception, and person
perception. All of his work employs a social cognitive neuroscience
approach that seeks to integrate the theories and methods of social
psychology on the one hand, and cognitive neuroscience on the other.
His teaching includes
seminars on social
cognitive neuroscience and current
topics in cognitive neuroscience (that focuses in some years on fMRI methodology and other years on functional neuroanatomy) as well as a lecture course on
experimental psychological methods for studying emotion and social
cognition.
Email
Post-Doctoral Fellows
Laura
Martin
Laura is interested in the influence of emotion regulation on behavior.
She received her Ph.D. in Psychology in 2011. Her dissertation work with Mauricio Delgado examined the
effect of emotion regulation on financial risk-taking and neural reward processing. Her current research
involves exploring the neural mechanism of implicit emotion regulation and comparing explicit and implicit
regulation. Prior to her graduate training, Laura worked with Jin Fan at Mount Sinai.
Dario
Bombari
Dario received his Ph.D. from the University of Bern in 2010.
His research interests range from face perception to empathy and emotions. His current projects
focus on the role of visual strategies during empathic judgments and emotion regulation tasks.
Graduate Students
Bryan Denny
Bryan is a fifth year graduate student interested in the temporal dynamics
of emotion regulation and also explores how emotion regulation can be improved in
people suffering from borderline personality disorder or major depression.
In addition, he is interested in social cognition more generally and the role that
medial prefrontal cortex plays in attributions about self and others.
Prior to coming to Columbia he worked as a research assistant with Todd Heatherton
at Dartmouth College.
Jennifer
Silvers
Jen got her BA from the University of Virginia
in 2005, and she is now a fifth year graduate student whose research primarily uses
multiple approaches (e.g., behavioral paradigms, fMRI) to examine what factors enhance and
diminish effect emotion regulation. Her main focus is the developmental trajectory of
emotional reactivity and regulation, as well as how emotion regulation work may be applied
to at-risk groups and individuals with psychopathology (e.g., BPD patients).
Prior to coming to Columbia, she worked as a research assistant with Alex Martin at NIMH.
Elina
Kanellopoulou
Elina is a fourth year graduate student
interested in understanding and facilitating effective self-regulation towards the
successful pursuit of one's goals. She is currently exploring the utility and affective
impact of employing different mindsets and cognitive strategies in the context of health
choices. She is also interested in the relationship between existential awareness and
authenticity in decision-making. Elina obtained a BA and Masters degree on Mathematics
and Philosophy from the University of Oxford, UK. She was born and raised in Athens, Greece.
Bruce
Doré
Bruce is a third year graduate student interested
in the regulation of positive emotion in health and psychopathology. Current projects
investigate the cognitive and brain processes that underlie our ability to 'look on the
bright side' in response to negative life experiences and the motivational factors that
influence when and how we choose to regulate our emotions. He is also broadly interested
in the relationship between lab-based and real-world measures of cognition, emotion, and
behavior. Before coming to Columbia, Bruce worked with Linda Parker at the University of
Guelph and Alan Kingstone at the University of British Columbia.
Noam
Zerubavel
Noam is a second year graduate
student interested in the self-regulation of behavior toward tempting stimuli, and
how this is socially influenced. His research focuses on predicting real-world behavior
and related health outcomes using psychological and neuroimaging paradigms in the lab.
Prior to graduate school Noam researched causes of the precipitous increase in autism
prevalence with the Understanding Autism group at Columbia University, led by Dr. Peter Bearman.
Carey
Bollinger
Carey is a first year graduate student
interested in studying how the presence of other people, animals, and of context
impact emotional states, empathic accuracy and health outcomes. She is also
interested in the intersection of law and psychology, and in the insight psychological
research can have for jury deliberations, eye-witness testimony, and false confessions.
She graduated from Harvard College and Columbia Law School. Prior to graduate school,
Carey worked as an attorney, and she also has a Masters degree in International
Affairs, with a focus on public health, from Columbia University.
Seth
Kallman
Seth is a first year graduate student
interested in self-regulation of behavior and empathic accuracy. He received his B.S.
in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the University of Rochester in 2009. Prior to
joining the lab, Seth worked at the National Institute of Mental Health on a project
studying food perception in lean and obese individuals with Drs. Alex Martin,
Kevin Hall, and Kyle Simmons.
Rebecca
Martin
Rebecca is a first year graduate student
interested in how motivational states are influenced by social, cognitive, and
emotional factors, and how these types of emotion-cognition interactions are
represented in the brain. She received her B.A. in History from New York University,
an M.A. in Teaching from UC Santa Cruz, and an M.Ed. in Mind, Brain, and Education
from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Prior to joining the lab, Rebecca
worked in John Gabrieli's lab at MIT on executive functioning and memory development
imaging studies.
Jenny
Porter
Jenny is a first year graduate student
interested in the social, cognitive, and developmental factors and perceptual cues that
impact empathic accuracy in adults and adolescents. She is currently working on a task
to investigate the relationship between introspective ability for one's own emotions
and empathic accuracy for others' emotions. She received her B.S. in Brain, Behavior &
Cognitive Sciences from the University of Michigan in 2008, and has since worked with
Alex Todorov at Princeton University and with Lisa Feldman Barrett at Northeastern University.
Research Assistants
Jocelyn Shu
Jocelyn
is the lab manager and a research assistant working primarily on studies that
investigate emotion regulation in adolescents and patients with borderline
personality disorder. She has also been working on a project that is exploring
the neural regions underlying emotional awareness. Prior to being at this lab,
she received a B.F.A. in Painting through a joint program with the University
of San Francisco and the California College of the Arts. She began studying
psychology as a postbaccalaureate student at Columbia University.
Katie Insel
Katie graduated from
Columbia in 2010 with a BA in psychology. Her work focuses on the developmental
trajectory of appetitive and aversive emotion regulation in children and adolescents.
Jochen Weber
Jochen is a senior imaging data
analyst. He brings his all-around
elfin magic and special expertise in mathematics, programming and prior
work experience at BrainVoyager to the SCN Lab to
assist with data analysis and visualization.
Alumni
(more recent departures listed first)
Richard Lopez
Rich
was a research assistant from 2009-2011 after receiving his BA in psychology
from Princeton University, where he worked in the lab of Alex Todorov.
He studied craving regulation in cigarette smokers and methamphetamine users.
He currently is a PhD candidate at Dartmouth College in the lab of Todd Heatherton.
Ajay
Satpute
Ajay received his PhD from UCLA in 2008, and is now working as a postdoctoral fellow
at the lab of Lisa Feldmann-Barrett. He has interests in the neural bases of
social cognition, emotion and learning and in developing new analytic and
computational methods to study their interactions.
Jamil Zaki
Jamil got his PhD from Columbia University in 2010, and is now a
postdoctoral fellow working with Jason Mitchell at the Harvard Center for Brain Science.
His research focuses on the cognitive and neural bases of social behavior, particularly w.r.t.
empathy and empathic accuracy, social influence, and altruism. In Fall 2012, Jamil will be
taking an Assistant Professor position at Stanford University.
Chukwudi Onyemekwu
Chuk was a research assistant from 2009-2010 and is now working at the
Substance Treatment and Research Service (S.T.A.R.S) at the New York State Psychiatric Institute,
where he investigates the role of stress sensitivity in perpetuating cocaine use after abstinence.
He is currently applying to med school for the 2012 matriculation period.
Hedy Kober
Hedy received her PhD from Columbia
University in 2009 and was a
post-doc for one year and now is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University. She continues to
collaborate on projects examining the regulation of appetitive desires in
healthy adults and in substance abusers as well as meta-analyses of the
neural systems underlying social cognition and emotion regulation.
Katherine Remy
Katherine
was a research assistant and graduate of Columbia with a BA in Psychology who won
the prestigious Jennifer A Pack Prize. She worked on studies of craving
regulation in substance abusing populations, and emotion regulation in
borderline personality disorder and children. She now resides in Norway.
Kim
Montgomery
Kim was a post-doctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health
and Society Scholars Program.
She has interests in the neural bases of social cognition, the
mirror system, perspective taking, interpersonal relationships and
health. She is currently working on
a project that examines their inter-relationships. She is currently a public policy Fellow
in Washington DC.
Peter Mende-Siedlecki
Peter
was a research assistant from 2007-200 after receiving his BA from Columbia. He worked on
studies of emotion regulation, pain regulation, and their relationship to
addiction. He Currently is a
graduate student in Psychology at Princeton University.
Ethan
Kross
Ethan was a post-doctoral fellow from 2007-2008 and is now an Assistant
Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. He is an on-going collaborator on
projects examining the use of different forms of cognitive construal (e.g.
those involve accepting as opposed to reinterpreting the meaning of
stimuli) to regulate emotion.
Josh
Davis
Josh received his PhD in Spring
2008 and is now a Term Assistant Professor at Barnard college. He continues collaborative work on
projects examining the role of the body (i.e. somatic and behavioral
expression) in emotion and emotion regulation. Josh has broad interests in the nature of
psychological theories, and theory-building more generally.
Andreas
Olsson
Andreas was a post-doc from 2005-2007 and
is now a research fellow at the Karolinska
Institute in Sweden.
He is an-going collaborator on projects examining the behavioral and neural
mechanisms mediating emotions in social contexts, including the ways in
which cognitive goals and strategies can affect the emotional processes
involved in the perception of, and learning from, others.
Brent
Hughes
Brent was the SCAN Unit lab
manager and a research assistant working on projects examining the neural
bases of emotion regulation and pain.
Brent was a U.
of Michigan undergrad
and after graduating, managed the lab of Dr. Steve Taylor. Brent is now a graduate student at the University of Texas
at Austin.
Matthew Davidson
Matthew was the SCAN Unit systems administrator, go-to
person for computing and programming needs, and fMRI
data analyst. Matt has a sardonic
wit and the most complete collection of politically savvy t-shirts this
side of the Hudson. He is now a graduate student in the
Department of Psychology at Columbia
working with Hakwan Lau.
Sonja Schmer-Galunder
Sonja was the SCAN Unit lab manager, and in that role
worked on various projects related to stress and cognition and emotion
regulation. She has a master’s
degree in sociology and was the manager for the Davachi
Lab at NYU prior to moving uptown.
Collaborators
Lisa
Feldmann-Barrett, Ph.D. website
Jennifer Bartz,
Ph.D. website
Jennifer Beer, Ph.D.
website
Niall Bolger, Ph.D.
website
B.J. Casey, Ph.D.
website
Joan Chiao,
Ph.D. website
Geraldine Downey, Ph.D.
website
Michael Green, Ph.D.
website
John Gabrieli,
Ph.D. website
James Gross, Ph.D. website
Hedy Kober, Ph.D.
website
Harold Koenigsberg, M.D. website
John Mann, M.D. website
Walter Mischel, Ph.D. website
Barbara Stanley, Ph.D. website
Tor Wager, Ph.D. website
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