Emotion & Cognition Lab

Congratulations to Joshua Senior, who received an award for his presentation at the 2024 ABRCMS conference! Joshua’s presentation, “How Aging Changes Attention: Investigating Mechanisms of Inhibition and Distractibility Using Eye-Tracking,” investigated age-related changes in attention by examining how older and younger adults process distractions and inhibit irrelevant stimuli. Using eye-trackin…

Earlier this year, Mara was one of the recipients of the 2024 USC Mentoring Awards. This award “honor[s] faculty who contribute to an engaging, supportive, inclusive academic environment through their mentorship of students and faculty.” While many know Mara as a world-renowned scientist, those who work with her consistently note her dedication to mentoring. Former and current lab members can att…

Congratulations to Martin Dahl for receiving a BrightFocus fellowship for his project entitled “Fingerprinting the impact of declining neuromodulation on late-life memory.” Emerging postmortem research indicates that neuromodulatory centers in the brainstem show Alzheimer’s disease (AD)-associated neuropathological changes long before cortical regions. Uncovering these early brainstem markers cou…

Congratulations to Martina on receiving the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Global Postdoctoral Fellowship! For her MSCA project, Martina will work with Mara Mather and Ilse Van Diest to investigate the effects of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) on LC activity in young and older adults.

Shelby Bachman and Nichole Lighthall, both PhD alumni of the lab, were featured in Gerontology’s Vitality magazine regarding their current work and how their time at USC prepared them. Read the full story here: https://gero.usc.edu/2024/01/10/passion-hard-work-determination/.

Congratulations to Josh Senior! He received the GLAM flash talk award for his talk “How Aging Changes Attention: Investigating Mechanisms of Inhibition and Distractibility Using Eye-Tracking.” Geroscience Los Angeles Meeting (GLAM), supported by the USC Leonard School of Gerontology, is a trainee-focused meeting to help unite and synergize the geroscience community in the greater Los Angeles area…

Kaoru Nashiro received her Ph.D. from the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, where she was awarded the Heinz Osterburg Prize for Best Dissertation. She completed postdoctoral training at the Center for Vital Longevity at the University of Texas at Dallas and then returned to USC where she has been research assistant professor since 2017. In this role, she directed the ‘Heart Rate Variabilit…

Congratulations to Jungwon Min, who has received the USC Psychology Department Excellence in Scientific Writing Award! Among her recent publications are a first-author paper on the differences in brain regions involved in up-regulating vs. down-regulating emotions and one documenting the effects of heart rate variability biofeedback on plasma amyloid beta and tau levels.

Hyun Joo Yoo first joined the lab as a research volunteer in 2013. She previously had received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. Since joining the lab, she has coauthored around 15 research papers, with a focus on the relationship between heart rate variability (HRV) and brain structure (see Yoo et al., 2018; Yoo et al., 2022). Recently, she led a lab team e…

Former Emotion & Cognition lab member Nichole Lighthall was recently promoted to Associate Professor at the University of Central Florida. She joins other former lab members Briana Kennedy, Sarah Barber and Steven Greening who have all recently received tenure at their respective universities. Congratulations to these amazing colleagues and researchers!

Congratulations to research assistant, Joshua Senior, who received second place in the Life Sciences category and a $500 award at the 2023 USC Undergraduate Symposium! He presented a research poster titled “Mechanisms of Attentional Control and Suppression in Aging.” The USC Undergraduate Symposium for Scholarly and Creative Work provides students with the opportunity to exhibit […] The post Josh…

Andy Kim received the F32 postdoctoral fellowship from the National Institute on Aging titled “The effects of noradrenergic activity on age-related distractibility.” Andy will be investigating the psychophysiological mechanisms of how regulating tonic noradrenergic discharge modulates attentional control using electroencephalography (EEG) and eye tracking. The post Andy Kim awarded F32 Fellowship…

Congratulations to Shubir Dutt, who was awarded one of the 2022 APA Division 40 Society for Clinical Neuropsychology Dissertation Award for his dissertation entitled “Locus Coeruleus Integrity in Cognitive Aging, Neurodegenerative Disease, and Neurovascular Function.” This award helps support research costs for clinical or counseling psychology doctoral students who demonstrate an interest and co…

Congrats to postdoctoral scholar Martin Dahl who was awarded the 2021 Otto Hahn Medal!  This award was given by The Max Planck Society, which annually honors young scientists for outstanding scientific achievements.  See more details of the award here: https://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/news/awards/dahl-awarded-otto-hahn-medal The post Martin Dahl awarded 2021 Otto Hahn Medal appeared first on Emotio…

Congratulations to former lab member David Clewett, who has been recognized as a 2021 Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science (APS)! The APS Rising Star designation is presented to outstanding psychological scientists in the earliest stages of their post-PhD research careers. David Clewett is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at UCLA. He received […] The post Dave Clewett Name…

Former lab member Michiko Sakaki received the JSPS prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in Japan for early/mid-career researchers, for her research “Construction of the Cognitive Neuroscience Model on the Interaction between Emotion and Memory Based on the Development Process.”  Congrats to Michiko! The post Former lab member Michiko Sakaki receives prestigious JSPS prize appeared first on E…

Congratulations to former lab member, Tae-Ho Lee, who has been recognized as a 2020 Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science (APS)!   The APS Rising Star designation is presented to outstanding psychological scientists in the earliest stages of their post-PhD research careers. Tae-Ho Lee is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Virginia Tech. He […] The post Tae-Ho Lee named 202…

Congratulations to Briana Kennedy, who joined the School of Psychological Science at the University of Western Australia as a tenure-track lecturer in January 2020!  Briana started in the Emotion & Cognition Lab in 2016, after completing her Ph.D. at UNSW Sydney. During her time as a postdoctoral fellow in the Emotion & Cognition Lab, Briana […] The post Briana Kennedy starts new tenure track pos…

Congratulations to Dave Clewett, who has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles!  He will join the department in July 2020. Dave received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Southern California in 2016, where he worked with Dr. Mara Mather to study emotion-cognition interactions. He […] The post Dave Clewett to join UCLA …

Last month, Sara Gallant presented her poster “Retroactive Selective Memory Enhancement via Emotional Arousal” at Psychonomics 2019.  This study examined how selective memory for neutral information would be influenced by increases in emotional arousal occurring before or after learning. When participants viewed emotionally arousing faces after learning, their selective memory for neutral faces v…