Ajay Satpute
moattari
Primary Area: Social and Affective Neuroscience
Email: ajay.satpute@ucla.edu
Research and Teaching Interests:
My lab studies the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying social and emotional experiences in humans. We design brain imaging experiments and use machine learning techniques to address fundamental theoretical questions such as: How does brain activity relate with feelings and emotions including pleasure, fear, and even moral outrage? How do we represent other people as social agents with thoughts and feelings of their own? And what role does language play in shaping emotion? We approach these questions using predictive processing and constructionist theories of brain-behavior relationships.
Of note, my lab will be accepting students for the upcoming cycle.
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