Professor of Psychology; UM Faculty Ombuds
About
Research in my laboratory uses an interdisciplinary approach to study the interface between emotion and decision making. There are currently two main lines of research:
- How do people process the emotions of others and how does this affect the type and amount of help they offer?
- How do people make decisions about allocating resources like food, money, and material goods?
In both of these lines, we try to determine the proximate (what the brain and body are doing) and ultimate (why they exist, how they evolved) bases of the complex behaviors. In order to do this, we have to use a variety of methods including measuring overt behavior (via computer responses or video coding), personality (via scales or questionnaires), emotion (via self-report and psychophysiology) and brain activity (via PET and fMRI).
Field(s) of Study
- Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience
