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Seeing Happiness in Ambiguous Facial Expressions Reduces Aggressive Behavior
Encouraging young people at high-risk of delinquency to see happiness rather than anger in facial expressions appears to dampen their levels of anger and aggression
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Nikolaus Steinbeis
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences www.cbs.mpg.de/staff/steinb-10018 What does your research focus on? I am a developmental psychologist and neuroscientist with a focus on social and affective processes, decisions, and abilities. Using neuroimaging techniques I try to characterize the structural and functional brain changes occurring during childhood and adolescence. I then use this information to see how it can account for the observed changes in social behavior and affective experience by means of paradigms derived in part from economic game theory and social psychology. What drew you to this line of research and why is it exciting to you?
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Nicholas Scurich
University of California, Irvine http://socialecology.uci.edu/faculty/nscurich What does your research focus on? Broadly speaking, I study psychology and law. The general theme of my research is judgment and decision making in the legal system. I also study violence risk assessment and risk communication. What drew you to this line of research and why is it exciting to you? One person in particular drew me to this area of research. As an undergraduate majoring in physics, I took an elective course entitled Law and Psychology, which was taught by Tom Lyon (University of Southern California), a law professor/psychologist. By the third lecture, I had changed my major to Psychology.
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In-Sue Oh
Temple University www.fox.temple.edu/mcm_people/in-sue-oh/ What does your research focus on? My current research interests center on the roles of various individual differences (e.g., personality, cognitive ability, work experiences) in predicting and explaining important work outcomes (e.g., work attitudes and job performance).
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Robin Nusslock
Northwestern University http://mdl.psych.northwestern.edu/index.html What does your research focus on? My research focuses on examining abnormalities in reward-processing and reward-related brain function in mood disorders such as depression and bipolar disorder using multi-modal techniques involving psychosocial indices, neurophysiology (electroencephalography; event-related potentials), and neuroimaging (fMRI). My colleagues and I propose that risk for bipolar disorder involves a hypersensitivity to cues of possible reward which can lead to excessive goal-directed motivation in response to rewarding stimuli (i.e., mania).
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Esha Massand
Birkbeck, University of London www.bbk.ac.uk/psychology/ What does your research focus on? My research focuses on neurodevelopmental disorders such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and Down’s syndrome. I am interested in the impact of these disorders on developmental trajectories, particularly as it concerns cognitive abilities. In my research on ASD I have shown that even when overt behaviours are similar to typically developing controls, those with ASD display different underlying brain processes. In my most recent research, I have started to investigate the links between Down’s syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease.
