Core Faculty
 |
Lisa Feldman Barrett, Professor (Ph.D. University of Waterloo, 1992)—Emotion. The structure of emotion. The influence of language and conceptual knowledge in emotion perception and emotion experience. Individual variation in affective processing. Sex differences in emotion. |
 |
Hiram Brownell, Professor (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University, 1978)—Cognitive neuropsychology: how injury to various parts of the brain can selectively impair linguistic and cognitive ability; language: theory of mind, discourse, narrative, and lexical semantics; methodology. |
 |
Donnah Canavan, Associate Professor (Ph.D. Columbia University, 1969)—Effects of shared enthusiasm; the development of individual differences: fear of success, healthy, and conventional orientations to success; psychological separateness and narcissism; psychology of self-esteem and of adult children of alcoholics. |
 |
Sara Cordes, Assistant Professor (Ph.D. Rutgers University, New Brunswick, 2005)—Cognitive development; Numerical cognition; Infant representations of quantity Developmental behavioral economics; Adult and child psychophysics of quantity |
 |
Randolph Easton, Professor (Ph.D. University of New Hampshire, 1974)—Perceptual and cognitive processes; spatial representation and imagery; relations among the perceptual systems; visual dominance; sensory substitution in the handicapped. |
 |
Elizabeth Kensinger, Associate Professor (Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003)—Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience: The effect of emotional content on memory; specifically, the cognitive and neural mechanisms through which emotion influences the vividness and accuracy of memory, and how these influences change across the adult lifespan; research questions are investigated through behavioral testing of young and older adults and functional neuroimaging (fMRI). |
 |
Ramsay Liem, Professor (Ph.D. University of Rochester, 1970)—Community Psychology (intergenerational transmission of political trauma, human rights and mental health); Asian American/Korean American Studies (Asian American history and ethnic identity formation). |
 |
Sean MacEvoy, (Ph.D. Brown University, 2003)—Human visual neuroscience, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and psychophysics: neural mechanisms of form perception and object recognition; perceptual learning; functional organization of the human visual cortex. History of neuroscience. |
 |
Michael Moore, Associate Professor (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1978)—Children's participation in organized sport: parent-child interactions, emotional development; Cognitive development: memory organization, children's understanding of the "rules of the game," automatic processing. |
 |
Gilda Morelli, Associate Professor (Ph.D. University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 1987)—The social, cultural, and economic circumstances related to young children's experiences, learning and development, with an interest in children and families in US and African communities. Domestic and international social policies and programs for young children and families. |
 |
Michael Numan, Professor (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1973)—Neurobiology of motivation, emotion, and social behavior; specifically neurobiology of parental behavior in rodents and the effects of hormones and experience on the relevant hypothalamic, limbic, and striatal circuits. |
 |
Gorica Petrovich, Assistant Professor (Ph.D. University of Southern California, 1997)—Neurobiology of motivation and feeding behavior; functional organization of the brain systems mediating environmental control of food intake, specifically interactions between the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and hypothalamus; modulation of hunger and satiety mechanisms by learning and stress. |
 |
Karen Rosen, Associate Professor (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1984)—Social and emotional development during infancy and early childhood; parent-child attachment relationships; sibling relationships. |
 |
James A. Russell, Professor (Ph.D. UCLA, 1974)—Emotion. The expression and recognition of emotion through faces. Children's understanding of emotion and the development of emotional experience. Cultural influences on emotion. The distinction between mood and emotion and scientific taxonomies of each. |
 |
Ehri Ryu, Assistant Professor (Ph.D. Arizona State University, 2008)—Quantitative Psychology: multilevel modeling; model fit assessment in multilevel structural equation modeling; two approaches to analyzing multivariate multilevel data; longitudinal data analysis. |
 |
Scott Slotnick, Assistant Professor (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1998)—Cognitive Neuroscience: Neural mechanisms of visual memory; control regions and sensory effects associated with retrieval of visual memories; subjective experience during memory retrieval; cortical substrates associated with visual feature-based perception/attention. |
 |
Maya Tamir, Assistant Professor (Ph. D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004)—Emotion regulation; Cognition, motivation and emotion; Social cognition; Individual differences in emotion and information processing. The interpersonal and intrapersonal functions of emotions and their potential variation across individuals. Learning about the utility of emotions. The role of hedonic and instrumental functions of emotions in emotion regulation. |
 |
Joseph Tecce, Associate Professor (Ph.D. Catholic University, 1961)—Psychophysiology of health, including body languages as indicators of emotions and stress and cognitive-behavioral methods to control stress. |
 |
Ellen Winner, Professor (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1978)—Developmental psychology of the arts in typical and gifted children; cognition and learning in the arts; transfer of learning from arts to non-arts learning. |
Related Faculty and Post-Docs
 |
Ali Banuazizi, Psychology Research Professor, Political Science Professor (Ph.D. Yale University, 1968) |
 |
Maximilien Chaumon, Postdoctoral Fellow (Ph.D. Université Pierre & Marie Curie, Paris, France)—I'm interested in contextual influences on visual perception, decision making and action selection. I'm using cognitive neuroscience methods such as fMRI, MEEG, and experimental psychology to investigate these issues. |
 |
Judith Dempewolff, Part-Time Faculty—Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist, Private Practice. Psychology of Gender and Abnormal Psychology. Clinical issues including eating disorders, use of meditation and awareness techniques as therapeutic tools, holistic health. |
 |
Jennifer Fugate, Postdoctoral Fellow (Ph.D. Emory University, 2008)—Jennifer Fugate's dissertation focused on how chimpanzees perceive the facial expressions and vocalizations of conspecifics. She currently works with Dr. Barrett investigating how language influences facial expression perception in humans. |
 |
Peter Gray, Research Professor (Ph.D. Rockefeller University, 1972)—Children's play (particularly age-mixed play); self-directed learning; evolutionary psychology, developmental psychology, educational psychology, general psychology. |
 |
Gene Heyman, Adjunct Associate Professor (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1977)—Choice and addiction. The role of working memory, and economic and motivational processes in drug use and choice. The biological and economic determinants of alcohol self-administration in rat models of alcohol dependence. The history and epidemiology of drug use and how popular and scientific understandings of voluntary behavior inform the understanding of addiction. |
 |
Yang-Ming Huang, Postdoctoral Fellow (Ph.D. University of York, 2006)—Affect and perception. My work focuses on how affective information modulates perceptual performances (such as orientation discrimination) and the perceptions of the external world. |
 |
Kelly Jaakkola, Part-Time Faculty |
 |
Jeffrey Lamoureux, Adjunct Assistant Professor (Ph.D. Duke University, 1998)—My research interests center on the mechanisms by which animals learn predictive relationships in their environment (e.g., Pavlovian and operant conditioning). Using rodent models, I investigate both the circumstances under which animals learn these predictive associations, as well as the neural systems that underly the process. Of particular interest to me are the mechanisms by which animals use contextual cues to retrieve "ambiguous" memories, and response recovery phenomena observed following extinction procedures (i.e., renewal, reinstatement). |
 |
Christina Leclerc, Postdoctoral Fellow (Ph.D. North Carolina State University, 2006)—Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience: Understanding the normal aging process from cognitive affective, and neuroscience perspectives; specifically, the effect of emotion on executive processes such as information processing, social judgment, and decision-making across the adult lifespan; research questions are investigated through behavioral, eyetracking, and functional neuroimaging (fMRI) testing of young and older adults. |
 |
Joan Lucariello, Affiliated Faculty, Professor in Lynch School of Education (Ph.D., City University of New York Graduate Center)—Cognitive development and its relation to learning; language development; cultural psychology; sociocultural effects on cognition, learning, and learning environments. |
 |
Spencer Lynn, Research Associate (Ph.D. University of Arizona, 2003)—Behavioral Neuroscience: Learning, decision-making, and emotion in humans and animals, and the breakdown of those processes in psychiatric illness. Use of mathematical modeling and EEG/ERP to investigate questions about behavioral function and cognitive mechanism. |
 |
Yoshiya Moriguchi, Research Associate |
 |
Marie Natoli, Part-Time Faculty |
 |
Marilee Ogren, Part-Time Faculty (Ph.D. University of Washington, 1979)—Primate visual system, developmental neurobiology, developmental disorders in humans. I do not have a research laboratory. I teach, write, and edit. In addition to teaching neuroscience and physiology at Boston College, I teach scientific writing at MIT. |
 |
Elif Ozdemir, Part-Time Faculty— |
 |
Michael G. Pratt, Affiliated Faculty Member, Professor of Organization Studies in the Carroll School of Management (Ph.D. University of Michigan)—Organizational, professional, and non-work identities and identification; intuition; distributed work; sensemaking; meaning of work. |
 |
David Smith, Part-Time Faculty (PsyD, Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, 1995)—Clinical Psychology: child, adolescent, and family psychotherapy; adolescent conduct disorders; treatment for trauma survivors and victims of violence; stress management; cognitive and personality assessment; community mental health services. |
 |
Amy Tishelman, Part-Time Faculty (Ph.D. West Virginia University, 1988)—Development and psychopathology; developmental perspectives on childhood trauma; school function and adjustment in traumatized children; forensic and clinical evaluation of sexual abuse and other forms of maltreatment; age and gender differences in the expression of trauma; the expression of trauma in children diagnosed with developmental disabilities; family and interpersonal violence. |
 |
Sherri Widen, Postdoctoral Fellow (Ph.D. Boston College, 2005)—Emotion and Development: Children’s understanding of emotion and how that understanding changes through the preschool years and beyond. Cue to emotion, label use, and category breadth each play a role in how children understand emotion. |