Our lab has an ambitious goal-- to use machine learning and reinforcement learning methods to bridge human cognitive neuroscience with social epidemiology and medical practice.
The human brain is continuously constructing and updating models of its body in its environment. Human environments are complex. Accessing resources involves the navigation of social and economic "landscapes." Personal experiences with those landscapes can have a profound effect on sense of self and well-being. Pain is a personal subjective experience that has a very explicit environmental cause that can be isolated, controlled, and studied in the laboratory. Therefore, we begin our lab's journey with pain. If we can make these complex links across societal structures and clinical outcomes within a person's brain representation of pain, we can then move on to more abstract mental states like fear and joy with greater scientific confidence.
The human brain is continuously constructing and updating models of its body in its environment. Human environments are complex. Accessing resources involves the navigation of social and economic "landscapes." Personal experiences with those landscapes can have a profound effect on sense of self and well-being. Pain is a personal subjective experience that has a very explicit environmental cause that can be isolated, controlled, and studied in the laboratory. Therefore, we begin our lab's journey with pain. If we can make these complex links across societal structures and clinical outcomes within a person's brain representation of pain, we can then move on to more abstract mental states like fear and joy with greater scientific confidence.
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see: Reddan (2020)
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Below we highlight three major themes of our current published research and hope you come back in Summer 2025 for two pre-prints that exemplify the lab's future directions.
Neurobiological foundations of pain and emotion.
Imagined simulations of perceptual stimuli can cause new learning that carries into subsequent real-world experiences.
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Download and try our predictive fMRI model of threat here
People organize emotional content in accordance to how they “feel” the emotion in their body, and this organizational structure corresponds with activity patterns in primary somatosensory and motor cortices
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Social context and interpersonal interactions
Observer inferences and storyteller’s self-ratings can be predicted from observer brain activity. Increased alignment of these predictive patterns scales with empathic accuracy.
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Support from a romantic partner, especially support involving soothing touch, can have analgesic effects on a person experiencing thermal pain stimulations.
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Extending neuroscience to public policy and the clinic
A narrative movie intervention can improve empathic understanding of formerly incarcerated people’s emotions and increase support for policies designed to improve the quality of life of people impacted by the US incarceration system.
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Multimodal pain interventions have the highest effect sizes.
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