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Understanding Mind-Body Influences
Wendy Berry Mendes focuses her research on embodiment -- how the mind and body reciprocally influence each other. Specifically, she looks at how the brain and body experience emotions, stress, and motivation and how physical responses influence behavior and decision-making. Her research looks at a wide range of topics from coping with stigma and discrimination, to the differentiation of “good” and “bad” stress physiology and how they influence decision-making, to mind-body relations across the lifespan.
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Learning from Experience
Daphna Shohamy researches learning, memory and decision making. Specifically, she tries to understand the underlying brain mechanisms of how we learn from experience and how we use what we learn to guide decisions and actions. She adopts an integrative approach that draws broadly on neuroscience to make predictions about cognition. Her research provides a deeper understanding of the cognitive and neural processes involved for different aspects of behavior. In 2011, Shohamy received a Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science (APS). Q&A with Daphna Shohamy
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The Power of Social Relationships
There’s no doubt about it, rejection hurts. One of the goals of Naomi Eisenberger’s research is to understand why. She looks at why emotional and physical well-being are so strongly affected by social relationships. She examines the underlying neural systems of complex socioemotional experiences (e.g. the rewards of social inclusion and the pains of social rejection) using neuroimaging techniques. Her work suggests that some of the neural regions that typically process physical pain may also be activated when experiencing social pain. She recently started exploring the neural underpinnings of positive feelings associated with social connection.
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Understanding Academic Stressors
Whether it’s before a big presentation, during an exam, or after grades have been posted, at some point or another, everyone experiences stress in school. Sian Beilock’s research analyzes how stress in academic settings affects performance. She is interested in various academic stressors such as the chronic stress that a female math major might experience from the negative stereotype that “men are superior to women in math,” the pressure that most people experience while taking a high-stakes college admissions test, and the anxieties some hold about their performance in a particular academic area (e.g., math anxiety).
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Mathematic Models and Human Learning
Thomas Griffiths developed mathematical models of higher level cognition. He focuses on the abstract computational problems that underlie inductive human cognition, such as probabilistic reasoning, learning causal relationships, acquiring and using language, and inferring the structure of categories. He researches the ideal solutions to those problems using ideas from probability theory and Bayesian statistics, used to calculate the likelihood of a hypothesis. These statistical tools allow him to analyze human learning and link computer science research to artificial intelligence and machine learning.
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Evaluating Emotional Responses
Evaluation is something people do every day, whether they are assessing their to-do list or forming opinions about a book they’re reading. William Cunningham is investigating how evaluating other people or objects leads to emotional responses. Through a combination of social psychological and cognitive neuroscience techniques, Cunningham has found that affective states (in other words, emotional states) are built moment to moment by multiple processes that link together relevant information about the person’s environment with their own personal attitudes.
