Research Projects in
the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
At the broadest level,
research in the lab examines the psychological and neural processes
involved in extracting social, emotional and cognitive meaning from the
world.
Current
projects include:
1.
How Are Our Emotions Generated? The Nature of Emotional
Appraisal For centuries, theorists have posited that emotions are generated by
appraisals, or interpretations, of the significance of events to one's
current goals, wants, or needs. The precise nature of these appraisal
processes, and the extent to which they can generate emotions quickly and
automatically as compared slowly and deliberately, is not clear. This
research project uses fMRI to examine the role of automatic and controlled
processes in interpreting or appraising emotional events.
2.
How Do We Regulate Our Emotions? The Mechanisms of
Cognitive Reappraisal If thinking can generate
feelings, it surely can alter them as well. Indeed, the ability to
cognitively reappraisal meaning of events is one of our most powerful means
of regulating emotional responses. Until recently, no research and
addressed the fundamental psychological and neural processes that enable us
to reappraise. This project examines the way in which reappraisal stems
from interactions between neural systems supporting cognitive control
processes on the one hand, and neural systems supporting emotional
appraisal processes on the other.
3.
Understanding What We're Thinking, Feeling, and
Intending One of the key component
processes of both appraisal and reappraisal is the ability to draw
inferences, or make attributions, about the nature of our own feelings,
desires, and intentions as well as the feelings, desires, and intentions
experienced by others. This ability is often discussed in the context of
theory of mind, but the relationship between theory of mind processes and
those used for emotional appraisal has only just begun to be investigated.
This project asks whether there are central mechanisms enabling us to draw
inferences about mental states, and what role they play in emotion and
social cognition.
4.
Understanding Who We Are An ability closely related to understanding
momentary mental states is the ability to draw inferences about enduring
aspects of our personality, traits, and dispositions, as well as the same
attributes possessed by other people. This project examines the way in
which we understand ourselves to possess traits and abilities (e.g.
outgoing, trustworthy, etc.), and whether we think about the traits
possessed by others in the same way we think about our own traits.
5.
Empathy The ability to empathically
connect with another person and understand what they are thinking and
feeling is so essential to human social interaction that empathic
impairments may profoundly disrupt one's ability to function normally in
the world (as is the case in autism). Empathy may depend importantly on the
appraisal and social cognitive processes used to generate emotions and
understand their interpersonal implications. This project seeks to understand
many aspects of empathy, including the nature of the mental representations
that underlie it, and the extent to which empathic ability is automatic as
compared to deliberate and controlled.
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