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).
Ø For relevant reviews of our work
on these topics, and related work from others, see:
Ochsner, K. N., Silvers, J. A.
& Buhle, J. T. (2012). Functional imaging
studies of emotion regulation: A synthetic review and evolving model of the
cognitive control of emotion. Annals of the New York Academy
of Sciences, 1251, E1-E24.
Ochsner, K. N. & Gross, J.
J. (2008). Cognitive emotion
regulation: Insights from social cognitive and affective neuroscience. Currents
Directions in Psychological Science, 17(1), 153-158.
Ochsner, K. N. (2008). The social-emotional
processing stream: Five core constructs and their translational potential
for schizophrenia and beyond. Biological Psychiatry, 64 48-61.
Ochsner, K. N. & Gross, J.
J. (2005). The cognitive control of
emotion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(5), 242-249.
- 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).
Ø For relevant reviews of our work
on these topics, and related work from others, see:
Zaki, J., & Ochsner, K. N.
(2012). The neuroscience of empathy:
Progress, pitfalls and promise. Nature
Neuroscience, 15(5), 675-680.
Zaki, J. & Ochsner, K. N.
(2011). Reintegrating the
Study of Accuracy Into Social Cognition Research. (Target Article) Psychological
Inquiry, 22:3, 159-182.
Olsson, A. & Ochsner, K. N.
(2008). The role of social
cognition in emotion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(2), 65-71.
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