Research Projects in
the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
At the broadest level, research
in the lab examines the psychological and neural processes involved
emotion, self-control, social cognition and learning both across the life
span and in individuals with clinical disorders. While some research projects focus on
just one of these abilities, most concern interactions among them. Our work on emotion regulation, for
example, examines the way in which our capacity for self-control enables us
to change the emotions we feel.
Similarly, our work on empathy examines the way in which social
cognitive and emotional processes interact to enable us to connect with and
understand other’s feelings. Examples of
current projects include:
- How Do We Regulate Our Emotions? 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. Or put
another way, how we feel about an event depends upon how we think
about it. If how we think determines what we feel, then changing what
we think should also change our emotions. Indeed, the ability to cognitively
change how we think about the meaning of events – an ability
known as cognitive reappraisal – is one of our most powerful
means of regulating emotional responses. A decade ago, when we began
our work in this area, no research and addressed the fundamental
psychological and neural processes that enable us to reappraise. The
SCN lab has numerous projects examining all aspects of our ability to
reappraise, or to use other ways of thinking to control feeling,
including:
·
Studies of the basic psychological and neural mechanisms that
determine when and how effective reappraisals – as well as other
forms of emotion regulation – stem from interactions between brain
systems supporting cognitive control processes on the one hand, and brain
systems supporting emotional appraisal processes on the other.
·
In collaboration with Walter
Mischel, also in Psychology at Columbia,
and B.
J. Casey, at Weill
Cornell Medical
College, we are
studying the development of emotion regulation abilities in adolescence, a
time of great social and emotional change. Visit here for more information
about this research.
·
With Yaakov
Stern at Columbia
Medical School
we also begun examining the ways in which emotion regulation may change in
older age.
·
Studies of how both regulatory capacities and emotional response
tendencies may be altered in substance users, like smokers (in
collaboration with Hedy
Kober, PhD at Yale University) and problem drinkers (in collaboration
with Jon
Morgenstern, PhD at Columbia Medical School) as well as in clinical
disorders ranging from borderline personality disorder (in collaboration
with Barbara
Stanley, PhD at Columbia Medical School and Dr. Harold Koenigsberg
at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine) to depression (in collaboration with
Drs. Jeffrey
Miller and John
Mann at Columbia Medical School and with Drs. James Murrough and Dennis Charney
at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine).
- How do we empathically connect with and understand others? 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. he SCN lab has numerous projects examining all aspects
of our ability to using thinking to control feeling, including:
·
Studies of the ways in which empathy depends on the appraisal and social
cognitive processes used to generate emotions and understand their
interpersonal implications. This work seeks to understand many aspects of
empathy, including the nature of the mental representations that underlie
it, the extent to which empathic ability is automatic as compared to
deliberate and controlled, and the ways in which it is influenced by
neurohormones like oxytocin (in collaboration with Jennifer Bartz,
PhD at McGill
University).
·
Studies of how the mechanisms underlying empathy may be altered by
disorders of social behavior and emotion, including Autism Spectrum
Disorder (in collaboration with Jennifer Bartz,
PhD at McGill
University) and
Schizophrenia (in collaboration with Michael Green, PhD at
UCLA).
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