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
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Dave Clewett to join UCLA as Assistant Professor of Psychology
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

Sara Gallant presents poster at Psychonomics 2019
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

Shai Porat wins award for exceptional presentation
Congrats to Shai Porat for winning an award for his exceptional presentation at the annual Finch Alzheimer’s Disease Symposium! The Finch Alzheimer’s Disease Symposium features presentations on basic and clinical science related to Alzheimer’s disease.

Podcast episode with Mara Mather
In this episode of “Lessons in Lifespan Health,” Mara Mather discusses her work in examining how emotion impacts our attention and memory, and how studying a small brain region called the locus coeruleus can shed light on how our brains change as we age. Her

Kelly Durbin wins APA Dissertation Award
Congratulations to clinical science doctoral student, Kelly Durbin, for winning the 2019 American Psychological Association (APA) Dissertation Research Award! This award is sponsored by the APA Science Directorate and assists science-oriented doctoral students of psychology with research costs.

Being hungry makes everything seem more emotional
We asked participants to fast before coming in to our lab to complete an experiment in which they viewed pictures of household and food items each paired with a positive, negative or neutral sound. When they arrived to our lab, we randomly assigned half of

Negative information is less distracting to older adults than younger adults
Briana Kennedy is a postdoctoral scholar in the Emotion & Cognition Lab at USC. She, Ringo Huang, and Mara Mather recently published a manuscript outlining their recent findings; they found that compared to younger adults, older adults are less distracted by negative information, despite both

Sara Gallant receives travel award to present at Psychonomics
Sara Gallant received ‘The Psychonomic Society and Women in Cognitive Science Travel and Networking Award for Junior Scientists’ to attend Psychonomics and present her poster reporting on the influence of arousal on suppression of distraction in younger and older adults. Older adults were more likely to

Former lab member Michiko Sakaki promoted to Associate Professor
After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo, Michiko Sakaki joined the Emotion & Cognition lab as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science postdoctoral fellow and, after a few years, was promoted to Research Assistant Professor at USC. In 2013, she assumed