Ajay Satpute
moattari
Assistant Professor
Primary Area: Social and Affective Neuroscience
Email: ajay.satpute@ucla.edu
Research and Teaching Interests:
Research interests: Different people may inhabit the same environment yet experience it in profoundly different ways. My lab investigates how the brain makes this possible — how prior experiences and predictive processes shape not only what we feel but the nature of conscious experience itself. Drawing on constructionist and predictive processing theories, we integrate psychology, neuroscience, and machine learning to examine the variability at the core of subjectivity. Our work has shown, for example, that fear does not correspond to a single neural signature but instead emerges from diverse brain states across contexts and individuals, and that language can shape how emotions are constructed and sustained. We also study how the brain anticipates and interprets the actions of others, highlighting the predictive mechanisms that underlie social cognition. Across projects, a central theme is that the brain does not merely react to the world but actively constructs emotional and social life through predictive processes that make each person’s experience distinctive.
Biography:
Ajay B. Satpute received his doctorate in psychology from UCLA and completed postdoctoral training at Columbia University. His research in social and affective neuroscience combines multimodal brain imaging (3T and 7T fMRI), psychophysiology, experimental psychology, and computational approaches including pattern analysis and deep learning, to model mind-brain-behavior relations. Before joining UCLA, he was on the faculty at Northeastern University and Pomona College. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience and previously served as President of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society.
Representative Publications:
Barrett, L. F., & Satpute, A. B. (2019). Historical pitfalls and new directions in the neuroscience of emotion. Neuroscience Letters, 693, 9-18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2017.07.045
Fiedler, S. A., Lee, K. M., Nook, E. C., Lindquist, K. A., Gendron, M., & Satpute, A. B. (2025). Affective abstraction predicts variation in alexithymia, depression, and autism spectrum quotient. Emotion, 25(7), 1730–1749. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001497
Iancarelli, A., Rypkema, N. R., Ritchey, M., & Satpute, A. B. (2025). The Affective Science Network: A fieldwide map of over 1 Million citations. Affective science, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-024-00292-8
Khan, Z., Wang, Y., Sennesh, E., Dy, J., Ostadabbas, S., van de Meent, J. W., Hutchinson, J. B., & Satpute, A. B. (2022). A Computational Neural Model for Mapping Degenerate Neural Architectures. Neuroinformatics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12021-022-09580-9
Lee, K. M., Ferreira-Santos, F., & Satpute, A. B. (2021). Predictive processing models and affective neuroscience. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 131, 211-228. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.09.009
McVeigh, K., Kleckner, I. R., Quigley, K. S., & Satpute, A. B. (2024). Fear-related psychophysiological patterns are situation and individual dependent: A Bayesian model comparison approach. Emotion, 24(2), 506–521. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001265
Satpute, A. B., & Lindquist, K. A. (2019). The default mode network’s role in emotion. Trends in cognitive sciences, 23, 851-864. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2019.07.003
Wang, Y., Kragel, P. A., & Satpute, A. B. (2024). Neural predictors of fear depend on the situation. Journal of Neuroscience, 44. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0142-23.2024