The Cognitive Psychophysiology of Emotion

Much of my recent research has concerned how emotionally evocative language is processed, and its effect on attention and memory. For most of this work, we record EEG while undergraduates are presented with words, phrases, or sentences that are emotionally neutral, or emotionally arousing, and must deal with the material in various ways. Typically, averaged event-related potentials as well as behavioral responses serve as the dependent measures in this work.

Sample projects and abstracts:

• Limits to the automaticity of responses to emotional words
• Levels of processing, word emotionality, and subsequent memory
• Effects of emotionality of words in phrases on event-related brain potentials
• Emotion, anxiety, and predictive inferences: An ERP investigation

Other Recent Research on Attention and Memory

More broadly, we have been interested in a variety of topics concerned with questions ranging from the role of attention in encoding and retrieval, to how metaphors are understood. Much of this work has been in projects that graduate students have developed as part of their masters or dissertation research in our lab.

Sample projects and abstracts:

• Cognitive style and recall of text: EEG alpha power as a predictor
• Remembering, knowing, and confidence: ERP indicants of recognition memory
• Contextual interference and retrieval practice in retention of a novel cognitive skill
• Functions of the central executive component of working memory
• Attention, distraction and assocation in retrieval of word pairs
• Learning about the anesthesia machine with transparent and opaque simulations