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Kristen Lindquist
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill www.unc.edu/~kal29 What does your research focus on? My research focuses on understanding the nature of human emotion. I’m broadly interested in understanding what emotions are, how they are created by the brain, and how they emerge during social behavior. My ongoing lines of research are united by the hypothesis that emotions are constructed of more fundamental psychological processes that are general to all mental states. In this view, emotions arise from the combination of basic positive and negative feelings, concept knowledge, and attention.
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Edward Lemay
University of New Hampshire http://lemay.socialpsychology.org What does your research focus on? I have a number of research interests related to interpersonal relationships. One line of research examines motivated cognition within the context of relationships, especially how motivation may bias perceptions of partners’ care, commitment, and regard. In a related line of research, I am examining the motivation to be valued by partners and its impact on interpersonal behavior. Finally, in a third line of research, I am examining how people manage relationships with chronically insecure and emotionally unstable relationship partners.
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Sangeet Khemlani
Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence, Naval Research Lab http://mentalmodels.princeton.edu/skhemlani http://www.nrl.navy.mil/aic/iss What does your research focus on? My research examines the mental representations and cognitive processes underlying deductive reasoning, creative thinking, and abductive explanations. A major challenge is to explain why people are predictably poor on some tasks, e.g., making certain deductions or estimating probabilities, but extraordinarily skilled at others, e.g., devising explanations. My collaborators and I think that the answer to this question is that mental simulations are the basis of high-level thinking.
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Philipp Kanske
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences www.kanske.de www.cbs.mpg.de/staff/kanske-291 What does your research focus on? My research interests evolve around the central topic of “emotion”. Specifically, my work tries to elucidate how emotions influence attention and cognitive control? How, in turn, emotions are modulated through cognitive processes? And what role the capacity to modulate emotions plays in understanding others? I study these questions in the context of psychopathology, using neuroscience tools to better understand the neural bases of alterations in depression, bipolar disorder, and other mental disorders.
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Can Our Beliefs About Exercise Make Us Fat?
Everyone is an expert when it comes to weight and weight control, and I’m no exception. I am what’s known as an “exercise theorist.” That is, I ascribe to the lay theory that sedentary lifestyle is a major cause of obesity, and that regular exercise is the cure. That’s one of the reasons I show up at the gym most days—and nag others to come with me. Not everyone agrees with this. In fact, so-called “diet theorists” believe that food is much more important than exercise. These everyday theorists believe that the obesity epidemic sweeping the U.S. and other developed countries is a consequence of portion size and fattening food choices.
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Raphael Bernier
University of Washington http://faculty.washington.edu/rab2 What does your research focus on? Broadly speaking my research focuses on autism spectrum disorders (ASD) — spanning etiology, neuroscience, diagnosis, and intervention. More specifically, I am interested in bridging the gap in our understanding of the relationship between putative causal genetic events, neurological underpinnings of deficits in social cognition, the behavioral presentation of ASD, and how to intervene to address the challenges in social cognition. What drew you to this line of research and why is it exciting to you?
