Case Affective Neuroscience Laboratory

Our laboratory primarily investigates individual differences in emotional processing. We assess emotional processes in various ways - via self-report, behavioral (facial) coding, autonomic or other physiological measures (EEG, fMRI, etc.). We are interested in how personality traits and/or biological systems (e.g. Behavioral Activation and behavioral Inhibition Systems; baseline neural activity) predict emotional reactivity as well as how people attempt to control emotional response (e.g. via the use of suppression or reappraisal techniques).

Although we have spent much time investigating emotion regulation, our new primary emphasis is on how emotions impact decision-making biases (especially decisions involving risk). At its very core, we think that most of life invokes risk - from deciding whether to ask that "special someone" out to deciding whether to pursue graduate school. We believe that people's propensities to accept risk are based on their expected positive and negative utilities from good and bad outcomes, respectively. Accordingly, we are interested in how affective biases play a role in such observations as prospect Theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). Theories of interest include Richard Thaler's "Path-Dependent" model, Alice Isen's "Mood Maintenance" model, Kevin Burns' Expectation-Violation-Explanation (EVE) model, and Brandstatter and colleagues' (2002) cognitive-emotional model of the probability weighting function. For an example of our "new" research, please see Demaree et al. (2008); Personality & Individual Differences.