Faculty - Social Psychology

Research and Teaching Interests

In graduate school, Kevin Ochsner and I coined the term Social Cognitive Neuroscience which has become a thriving area of research over the past decade and describes nearly all of the work done in my lab.  My appointments are in the Departments of Psychology, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences.  My lab uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the neural bases of social cognition and social experience.  In particular, we examine the neural bases of emotion regulation, persuasion, social rejection, self-knowledge, theory of mind, and fairness.     

My research has been published in top scientific journals including Science, Nature Neuroscience, American Psychologist, and Psychological Science.  This work has been funded by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, National Science Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.  Our findings have received coverage in the New York Times, Time magazine, Scientific American, Discover Magazine, and was the subject of a recent segment for ABC’s Nightline.    

I am also the founding editor of the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience and won the APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology (2007).  I am currently writing a book titled Fairness Tastes Like Chocolate: Evolution’s Bet on Making Us Social.    

My former trainees are now on faculty at Carnegie Mellon, University of Michigan, New York University, Ohio State University, and University of Oregon.   
 
Please visit the Social Cognitive Neuroscience lab

http://www.scn.ucla.edu/