Graduate student Steven Anderson presented his research on the emotion regulation strategy expressive suppression at the annual meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) in Singapore, held June 17-21. He presented data that he collected in Shihui Han's Culture and Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Peking University as part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes (EAPSI) Program. Steven found common recruitment of prefrontal cortical regions during the latter part of engaging in expressive suppression to both pain faces and negative affective pictures. He found significant differences in brain activity between the two stimulus types in the right amygdala, with greater amygdala activity toward pain faces vs. negative affective pictures especially in the earlier part of engaging in expressive suppression.

Each year, neuroimaging researchers from UM and FIU gather together for Brainhack: a one-day conference that involves a series of faculty talks, collaborative "hacking" sessions, and a trainee data blitz. Today, at Brainhack 2018, SCN Lab members Steven Anderson, Morgan Gianola, and Jenna Perry each gave brief talks on their respective lines of research. Great job, everyone!

Congratulations to Efrain Rodriguez who has been selected for a fully paid summer internship with The Leadership Alliance's Summer Research Early Identification Program. Efrain is a current junior at the University of Puerto Rico. This summer, Efrain will be working with graduate student Morgan Gianola on a project investigating pain perception in English-Spanish bilinguals. 

Congratulations to undergraduate research assistant Madeleine Snider, who was selected to receive funding from the University of Miami through the Lois Pope Neuroscience Summer Research Scholarship. This fellowship will allow Madeleine to return to the lab over the summer to work as an undergraduate research fellow. During this time she will continue her work studying opioid prescribing disparities.

Dr. Elizabeth Losin recently was awarded a K01 grant from the National Institutes of Health for a project titled "Psychological and Brain Mechanisms Underlying Disparities in Opioid and Non-Opioid Pain Treatment Decisions.". The K01 grant is a prestigious award for early career scientists, intended to provide financial resources for an intensive mentored project. This grant will allow our lab to study the factors leading to opioid prescribing disparities across different groups. The project will involve the creation of a stimulus set specifically designed to be ecologically valid, and the later use of this stimulus set in an fMRI setting to determine which brain areas are associated with clinicians viewing others' pain and making prescription decisions. There are also plans to bring in clinicians to make face-to-face assessments of pain using standardized patient actors, so as to help determine how the study's findings can be applied to clinical settings in order to reduce the negative impacts of pain stereotypes. All in all, our lab is very excited to begin work on this important project!

Dr. Elizabeth Losin and the SCN Lab's research on pain perception and communication were featured in an "Immersive Learning" special report by the University of Miami News. In the report, Liz discusses the nature of our research, various factors that may impact pain reporting in clinical settings, and a potential new grant that would allow us to study neural mechanisms operating when clinicians make judgments about their patients' pain.

We have a new paper published in Nature Neuroscience with collaborators in the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab (at CU Boulder) and others. We used functional MRI data across 18 studies to address the relationship between the medial frontal cortex (MFC) and pain, cognitive control, and negative emotion. We found similar patterns of brain activation across studies within these cognitive domains but distinct patterns between them, suggesting domain-specific representations of pain, cognitive control, and negative emotion in the MFC and nearby brain regions.

The Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience program celebrated Halloween with a potluck, which provided an excellent opportunity for researchers, especially those new to the department, to get to know one another. Lab members Liz Losin, Steven Anderson, Morgan Gianola, and Jenna Perry were in attendance. Can you figure out our costumes?

Graduate student Steven Anderson completed his NSF-funded East Asia and Pacific Summer Institute program. A closing ceremony was held in Beijing, China, on August 4 to honor Steven and the other participants. Congratulations to Steven for being selected for such an exciting opportunity!

Dr. Elizabeth Losin is a judge at this year's Science Art Cinema Film Festival, hosted at the Phillip and Patricia Frost Science Museum. Join us on Thursday, August 31, as we watch short science and science fiction films. We're excited to celebrate science and art through the lens of film with some esteemed guests, including Christian Slater! Doors and pre-show entertainment at 6:30; festival at 7:30.