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Atsushi Senju
Birkbeck, University of London, UK http://www.cbcd.bbk.ac.uk/people/scientificstaff/atsushi What does your research focus on? My research focuses on the typical and atypical development of the “social brain” — the network of neural structures specialized to process the social world that enables us to learn effectively from, interact with, and influence the behavior of others. I want to understand how young infants achieve these amazing abilities and how these capacities shape the development of adult social skills.
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Catherine J. Norris
Dartmouth College http://www.dartmouth.edu/~psych/people/faculty/norris.html http://norris.socialpsychology.org/ What does your research focus on? I’m interested in how individuals differ in their responses to emotional stimuli, how these emotional responses are affected by social factors, and the consequences of these patterns of responding for mental and physical health. I’m currently pursuing these interests in three separate lines of research. First, I study basic emotional processes like the negativity bias, the propensity to respond stronger to unpleasant than to pleasant events, and how they differ across individuals.
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Kristina Olson
Yale University, USA www.yale.edu/scdlab/ What does your research focus on? My research sits at the intersection of social and developmental psychology, exploring the emergence and development of social cognition. My lab focuses on three primary areas: (1) the emergence and development of social group attitudes; (2) “strategic pro-sociality,” or the ways in which children are more or less helpful or generous in different contexts; and (3) children’s understanding of ideas and intellectual property. What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you? The first area that drew me in to experimental psychology was social cognition.
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Kimberly Noble
Columbia University, USA http://www.needlab.cumc.columbia.edu/ What does your research focus on? I study socioeconomic disparities in children’s neurocognitive development. Specifically, we’ve known for decades that there are broad differences in children’s cognitive development and academic achievement as a function of socioeconomic status, or SES. But while classic measures of academic achievement surely reflect the function of the brain, they are relatively uninformative concerning perturbations in specific cognitive and neural processes.
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Shannon Wiltsey Stirman
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs National Center for PTSD Boston University School of Medicine, USA http://www.bumc.bu.edu/psychiatry/faculty-staff/ What does your research focus on? My research focuses on the implementation of evidence based practices in mental health. I’m particularly interested in two areas: training and sustainability. My collaborators and I are trying to determine the best methods of training clinicians to deliver new treatments. We also need to know more about what makes implementation efforts successful over the long-term. I would like to identify the factors that are most central to sustaining evidence-based practices.
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June Gruber
Yale University, USA http://www.yalepeplab.com/junegruber What does your research focus on? In what ways can feeling good actually be bad for us? There is a fair amount of research on associated difficulties of negative emotions like fear in anxiety disorders or sadness in depression. We know almost nothing about the potential negative consequences of positive emotions.