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Lauri Nummenmaa
Aalto University, Finland http://users.utu.fi/latanu What does your research focus on? I study the brain basis of emotions and social cognition. Using the multimodal brain-imaging approach, I aim to understand the neural circuitry that enables us to navigate the social and physical world unharmed. In particular, I am interested in how the brain automatically processes the emotional and social cues conveyed by other people, and how this enables our brains to tune our behavior and mental processes to manage, for example, social interactions. What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you? I simply stumbled upon brain imaging.
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Maarten Vansteenkiste
Ghent University, Belgium www.vopspsy.ugent.be/en/developmental-psychology/maarten-vansteenkiste.html www.selfdeterminationtheory.org What does your research focus on? I focus on motivational dynamics in my research. I am to understand how different reasons for engaging in an activity and pursuing different goals are related to outcomes, such as performance, persistence, learning, and well-being. Often, it is assumed that better outcomes will follow when people are more strongly motivated to engage in an activity.
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Lars Schwabe
Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany http://www.cog.psy.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/larss.html What does your research focus on? At the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and endocrinology, my research focuses on how stressful experiences influence cognitive processes. In particular, I am interested in how stress and stress hormones shape our memories and how they affect the interactions of multiple, declarative and non-declarative memory systems. What drew you to this line of research? Why is it exciting to you? To use the words of Jane Austen: ‘‘If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory.
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Victoria Southgate
Birkbeck, University of London, UK www.cbcd.bbk.ac.uk/people/scientificstaff/vicky What does your research focus on? I am interested in the cognitive and neural mechanisms that enable young children, from early infancy, to interact with and learn from other people, and how these might differ from other species. We know a great deal about the kind of social abilities that even very young infants possess, but we know much less about the neural mechanisms that underpin these abilities. My current research investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms that enable infants to understand and predict the actions of others.
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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.
