Lab Announcements
April 2013
Congratulations to our Spring 2013 Wikipedia editors! Thank you to all of our contributors as well as to our Wikipedia ambassador, Ryan Malloy! We've done some great work in the area of affective science on Wikipedia this semester and are proud to announce the following edits:
- Leticia Doprado and Alexandra Jenkins edited the Blunted Affect page.
- Aileen Gabriel created a Wikipedia page for the International Affective Picture System (IAPS).
- Lydia Hanington added the “Main Structures in the Limbic System” subsection under the Affective Neuroscience page.
- Amanda Holmes, Molly Standeven and Amy Stedman edited the Emotional Contagion page.
- Safiya Lahlaf edited the “Introduction,” “Creation of facial expressions” and “Universality” sections of the Facial expression page.
- Theresa Nguyen added the Large-scale brain network theory section under the Biology of Depression.
- Kayleigh O'Neill edited the Affect Consciousness page.
- Tali Rudy Zaltzman edited the “Personality disorders” subsection under the Empathy page.
- Emily Barina edited the "Brain Systems" subsection of the Autism page.
January 2013
Congratulations to our Fall 2012 Wikipedia editors for creating and editing articles relevant to the field of affective and psychological science. Many thanks as well to Wikipedia ambassadors Chris Nolder and Molly White for helping us out this semester! Below is a summary of the ISALab's most recent contributions to Wikipedia, written by our own undergraduate RAs:
- The section "Meta-analyses of affective neuroscience", written by Blair Weiss, on the page Affective neuroscience
- The section "Psychological applications of electrogastrograms", written by Leah Way, on the page Electrogastrogram
- The bulk of the page Separation Anxiety Disorder, written by Alysa Dempsey
- Edits by Sam DiChiara to the page James-Lange Theory
- Edits by Justin Kopec to the section "Dimensional models of emotion", on the page Emotion Classification
- Edits by Elijah Petter to the section "Neuroanatomy of facial processing", on the page Face perception
- Edits by Regina Lin to the page Evolution of Schizophrenia
- Edits by Lydia Hanington to the sections "Characteristics of habituation" and "Neuroimaging of habituation" on the page Habituation
- Edits by Alexandra Anastos to the page Affect in education
September 2012
The IASLab welcomes Shir Atzil and Jolie Baumann as postdoctoral researchers: Shir comes to the lab with a Ph.D. in Psychology from Bar-Ilan University in Israel, where she studied the neural substrates of parent-infant bonding. Her work investigates the neurobiology of human affiliation and the social brain. While in the IASL, Shir will study the neural bases of social reward using different imaging techniques. Jolie received her Ph.D. from Northeastern University in 2012. Her research broadly focuses on the influence of different emotional experiences on behavior and decision making. She is interested in how people make decisions when there are potential threats or risks present and, in particular, how affect or emotion may inform decision making in such contexts.
July 2012
Lisa Feldman Barrett has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. The RSC is Canada's most prestigious national organization of distinguished scholars, artists, and scientists, analogous to the National Academy in the USA. Congratulations!
June 2012
Victoria Spring has joined the IASLab as a full-time Research Assistant. Victoria recently graduated with a degree in Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she applied implicit and psychophysiological measures to study affective valence and pain offset in different types of psychopathology. She is presently interested in the influence of affect on moral decision-making, and the application of novel methods to study affect in individuals with severe psychopathology.
April 2012
With the help of Wikipedia ambassadors Molly White and Ryan Malloy, the IASLab has successfully completed the first wave of its Wikimedia Initiative, updating Wikipedia articles related to affective science. Please visit the Wikipedia pages below to take a look at what our research assistants have recently added to the online encyclopedia:
- Continuous Flash Suppression, a research method often used in our lab, written by Anna Neumann.
- Basicality Debate within Emotion Classification, written by Liat Bar-David.
- Emotional Expression. Alex Maxim, Tabish Riaz, Molly Sanders-Cannon, and Lauren Sears updated the definition of Emotional Expression and added the four different models of emotion to the page.
- Anxiety Sensitivity, written by Amanda White.
This is a continuing initiative in the lab so keep an eye out for future announcements sharing new pages that our lab has contributed to Wikipedia. Learn more about the APS Wikipedia Initiative.
Lisa Feldman Barrett was awarded Northeastern University's Excellence in Research and Creative Activity Award, at its 2012 Academic Honors Convocation.
January 2012
The IASL welcomes Keji Adebayo who joins us as a research assistant at Massachusetts General Hospital. Keji graduated from Williams College in 2004 with a BA in Anthropology. She has continued her education with classes in cognitive neuropsychology, philosophy of mind, health psychology, and a post-baccalaureate pre-medicine program. Keji's research interests involve the nature of individual subjective experience, consciousness, perception, and how people make meaning of life.
September 2011
Ian Kleckner has joined the IASL as a postdoctoral researcher. He received his Ph.D. in Biophysics from Ohio State University where he studied the molecular mechanisms of gene regulation. He is currently interested in studying the relationships between affect and interoception (the perception of one's internal physical cues) using psychophysiology and neuroimaging methods.
June 2011
Tamina Daruvala has also joined the IASLab as a full-time Research Assistant. She recently graduated from Oberlin College as a double major in Sociology and Psychology with Honors. She is currently working on a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies and a study examining granularity in the experience and perception of emotion.
Ajay Satpute has joined the IASLab as a postdoctoral fellow. His research examines the cognitive and neural processes involved in social cognition and emotion. In the IASLab, Ajay is conducting a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies (in collaboration with Tor Wager's lab) on how people parse the brain into functionally-defined networks or sets of brain regions, and how those networks are involved in constructing psychological experiences. He will also be using meta-analysis and experimental methods to examine whether and how language may shape the experience of emotion.
April 2011
Lisa Feldman Barrett has been elected to the board of directors of the Association for Psychological Science (APS).
On April 6th, several undergraduate students from the IASLab presented posters at Northeastern's Annual Research and Scholarship Expo. This video highlights work by Emily Dugan (supervised by Maria Gendron).
March 2011
On March 26th, the IASL was represented at the San Diego Science Expo. Janine Vlassakis (Lab Coordinator), Molly Sanders-Cannon and Tara Nichols (undergraduate researchers) interacted with 615 visitors using interpretations of the lab's affect and emotion research pertaining to context, language and neuroscience.
February 2011
At the end of this month, Junchen Shang (a Ph.D. student visiting from Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences) will be leaving after a year of research here at the IASL. Junchen studied how culture modulates the influence of affect on visual processing.
January 2011
We welcome Christy Wilson-Mendenhall as a postdoctoral fellow. Christy's work investigates how conceptual knowledge fundamentally shapes one's understanding of the world. She comes to the lab with a Ph.D in Psychology from Emory University's Program of Cognition and Development. While in the IASL, she will research the neural bases of abstract and emotion knowledge and of core affective properties of experience.
Welcome to visiting grad student Satoshi Nakashima. Satoshi will continue a project, in collaboration with Jennifer Fugate and Maria Gendron, to examine the effects of emotion words on the cognitive process for facial expressions.
December 2010
The IASL welcomes Dr. Karen Quigley, the new lab Co-Director. She comes most recently from the New Jersey Medical School at the University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey, and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) in East Orange, NJ. Her work focuses on the role of peripheral physiology in affective states, including interoception and the role of core affect in vision. She also is interested in the relation of peripheral physiological changes to reports of physical symptoms vs. affective feelings. She continues her work on deployment health issues with the VA in Bedford, MA, recently completing a prospective longitudinal study of soldiers deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan, with follow-up through the first year after their return from combat deployment.
November 2010
At the Living Lab Summit at the Museum of Science in Boston, Janine Vlassakis accepted the Education All-Star Award on behalf of the IASL. In 2009-2010, Janine and her undergraduate research assistants interacted with over 400 museum visitors. In addition to the Living Lab program, Janine also educated students at Notre Dame Academy in Hingham, MA, Norwell High School, and Newton North High School this fall. She will continue this mission in Spring 2011 at other local schools.
October 2010
Jenny Porter comes to us from the Todorov Lab at Princeton University where she focused on person perception and first impressions. She received her B.S. from the University of Michigan in 2008 where she studied empathy and the role of emotion in decision-making with Stephanie Preston. Currently, Jenny is involved in several neuroimaging studies in the IASL to (1) elucidate how the brain constructs various mental states, and (2) measure the interplay of vision and affect -- how what we see influences how we feel and vice-versa.
The IASL exhibited at the USA Science & Engineering Festival this month in Washington DC. Janine Vlassakis and volunteers interacted with approximately 1,100 visitors and collected data from 96 participants.
August 2010
The IASL has moved to Northeastern University.
June 2010
The IASL is pleased to welcome Joe Andreano as a Postdoctoral Fellow. Joe completed his doctoral research with Larry Cahill at the University of California, Irvine. His thesis work used neuroimaging to study the interactions between glucocorticoid stress hormones and ovarian sex hormones in modulating the consolidation of emotional memories. His current work with the IASL will investigate changes in emotional memory that occur due to aging, specifically age-related changes in the mnemonic effects of novelty and positive valence.
We bid a fond farewell to Krystal Yu. Krystal has worked for the past year as a full-time Research Assistant, and we wish her the best of luck.
The IASL will be making a highly anticipated move to Northeastern University in August, 2010.
April 2010
Congratulations to Kristen Lindquist who has been awarded a Mind Brain Behavior postdoctoral fellowship from Harvard University.
March 2010
Congratulations to Dr. Kristen Lindquist on earning her Ph.D. in defense of her dissertation, The Brain Basis of Emotion: A Meta-analytic Review.
January 2010
The IASL welcomes Alexandra Touroutoglou and Junchen Shang to the lab! Alexandra completed her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, where she studied the emotion of surprise in problem-solving. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Radiology at MGH through the IASL. Junchen Shang is a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. She is visiting the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory for one year (Nov 2009 - Nov 2010). Her research interest is affective learning and visual processing.
We also bid a fond farewell to Yoshiya Moriguchi. He has gone back to Tokyo where he will take the position of Section Chief of Clinical Pathophysiology at the National Institute of Mental Health, which is a division of the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry. We wish him the best of luck!
September 2009
The IASL welcomes Jasmine Mote and Erica Boothby as RAs. We also welcome Erika Segal, Jon Entis, and Aggie Zhang as first year graduate students.
August 2009
The IASL bids farewell to Mariann Weierich, who leaves us to take a position as Assistant Professor at Hunter College. Good luck, Mariann!
June 2009
The IASL welcomes Janine Vlassakis as our new lab coordinator at the BC site and for our research at the Museum of Science in Boston.
Congratulations to Jennifer Fugate who was awarded an NRSA from NIMH!
December 2008
Kristen Lindquist has received the Engelhard Pingree Fellowship from the Boston College Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. It is awarded to one graduate student each year for achievement in furthering the University's research mission.
Lisa Feldman Barrett was named to the Board on Behavioral, Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences, National Academy of Sciences.
November 2008
The IASL welcomes Yoshiya Moriguchi, M.D., Ph.D., and Spencer Lynn, Ph.D., both of whom join us as as research scientists.
October 2008
The IASL welcomes Maximilien Chaumon as a postdoctoral fellow. Max joins us from Université Pierre & Marie Curie, Paris, and is located at MGH in the Bar lab.
September 2008
The IASL welcomes our newest graduate student, Kevin Bickart, who is located at Boston University.
Lisa Feldman Barrett testified before Congress on the importance of funding basic research in the social sciences.
August 2008
Hui Wen Yu joins the IASL as a new RA. Hui Wen is located at our Boston College lab site. Welcome aboard!
The IASL also welcomes Rebecca Dautoff as a new RA at our MGH lab site.
July 2008
The IASL bids farewell to Eliza Bliss-Moreau, who leaves us with her Ph.D. to take up a postdoctoral fellowship in David Amaral's primate lab at UC Davis. Good luck, Eliza!
The IASL welcomes our new postdoctoral fellow, Jennifer Fugate, who joins us from Emory University. Jennifer is located at our Boston College lab site.
May 2008
The IASL welcomes Yang-Ming Huang as a postdoctoral fellow. Yang-Ming joins us from the University of York and is located at Indiana University in the Pessoa lab.
April 2008
Congratulations to Maria Gendron who has received her Masters Degree in Psychology at Boston College. Maria will be staying on to complete her Ph.D. She is located in the Boston College lab site.