Culture and human development is my passion. My contributions have included comparative studies across species, ages, cultures, and historical time. Most exciting now: a study of over a half billion social media posts shows a cultural shift during COVID-19 towards concerns, behaviors, and values adaptive in the subsistence ecologies of human evolution. This new online…
Dr. Wassum’s research is focused on understanding the neural correlates underlying motivation and decision making and how this information can be harnessed to understand and treat mental illness and substance use disorder. To make good decisions we have to get into the time machine that is our brain and cast ourselves into the future to…
Former Bruin seeks to end stigma around anxiety and depression The Cleveland Cavaliers’ Kevin Love, a former Bruin basketball player who has publicly shared his struggles with panic attacks, anxiety and depression, has committed $500,000 through his foundation — matched by a $500,000 UCLA Centennial Term Chair Match — to establish the Kevin Love Fund…
Dr. Benjamin Karney’s research examines how intimate relationships succeed and fail. Specifically, his work emphasizes how forces external to couples and beyond their control (like stress and socioeconomic status) affect processes within the couple (like communication and satisfaction). Successful relationships are the foundation of emotional well-being, and relationships with an intimate partner are more strongly…
Our lab studies how electrical activity in the brain mediates cognition and behavior, one of the most exciting—and challenging—questions facing neuroscientists and psychologists today. The Wikenheiser lab endeavors to understand how the brain mediates behavior. We tackle this question by measuring the activity of large numbers of neurons as rats perform cognitively-demanding behavioral tasks. We…
Dr. Montoya and the Quantitative Research Collaboratory (QRClab) are a team of researchers working to create and assess statistical and research methods which assist psychological scientists in answering their research questions about why and when. A primary focus of our lab is on mediation and moderation analysis, which are statistical methods aimed at helping researchers…
Dr. Blaisdell is interested in the animal mind. He and his lab use behavioral procedures to explore the interaction between bottom-up associative learning processes and top-down rational decision making processes. Particular interests include spatial cognition, causal reasoning, rule learning, and mental imagery. His research integrates a variety of approaches—ranging from habituation, sensitization, Pavlovian conditioning, and…
The basic goal of Dr. Lu’s research is to investigate how humans learn and reason, and how intelligent machines might emulate them. Dr. Lu and her lab members approach this basic question as it arises in both perception and higher cognition. Her research is highly interdisciplinary, integrating theories and methods from psychology, statistics, computer vision,…
As questions in social science research become more complex and diverse, statistical methods must evolve to better answer them. My research is centered on developing sophisticated statistical methods for analyzing complex data and facilitating study design. There is an increasing attention on Bayesian methods in psychological and educational research. I have been developing new Bayesian…
My lab investigates the cognitive, behavioral and biological risk factors and correlates of anxiety and depression in order to develop novel treatments. We take a multidisciplinary, science-driven approach and have a commitment to bringing our findings into clinical practice settings. We’ve observed that anxious or depressed individuals tend to pay more attention to threat-relevant stimuli,…