The lab welcomes out new graduate student Olivia Chen. Olivia graduated from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2018 with a Bachelor of Science in Statistics and Psychology. Olivia has worked as a clinical research coordinator at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital with people affected by sickle cell anemia.
Emma will start her PhD. program in Clinical Child Psychology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, on the child/family track with Dr. Youngstrom as her mentor.
Nikta graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a B.S in Cognitive science, where she worked in the Decision Analytics lab with Dr. Edward Cokely.
See our latest publication: Gender biases in estimation of others' pain.
Available here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpain.2021.03.001 [pdf]
See our latest pre-print: Effect sizes and test-retest reliability of the fMRI-based Neurologic Pain Signature.
Available here: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.29.445964v1
See our latest publication: Expressive suppression to pain in others reduces negative emotion but not vicarious pain in the observer.
Available here: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-021-00873-1
Check out our new paper, “Modeling neural and self-reported factors of affective distress in the relationship between pain and working memory in healthy individuals,” by recent graduate students Steven Anderson, Ph.D., and Joanna Witkin, Ph.D., in collaboration with Taylor Bolt, Ph.D., Claire Ashton-James, Ph.D., and Elizabeth Losin, Ph.D. The article was published in Neuropsychologia, an international journal in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience. The authors analyzed open-science neuroimaging and self-report data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP). The study analyzed data from healthy individuals experiencing pain within the past seven days. The authors found that higher pain intensity in the past seven days was associated with reduced working memory performance and increased activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), a brain region involved in pain, affective distress, and cognition. The authors also found that healthy participants with pain had different levels of activity in the vmPFC during the working memory task than healthy participants who did not report pain. Interestingly, this activity pattern was more similar to patients with chronic pain than healthy patients exposed to pain manipulations in a laboratory.
Pre-proof Journal PDF Version|Press Release
Read MoreCheck out our new paper, “Selection and Characterization of Cultural Priming Stimuli for the Activation of Spanish and English Cultural Mindsets Among Hispanic/Latino Bilinguals in the United States,” by our very own Morgan Gianola, M.S., Beatriz E. Yepes, B.A., and Elizabeth A. Reynolds Losin, Ph.D., in the Social Psychology journal where we empirically selected, and validated images that prime people’s minds for Hispanic culture or US-American culture. This set was tested with Hispanic/Latinx participants that spoke English and Spanish fluently. You can find these images with their descriptions and ratings, as well as how to use them in your own study here on Open Science Framework (OSF): The Hispanic and the U.S.A. Culturally Priming Image Descriptions and Ratings.
Read MoreCongratulations to our 4th-year graduate student, Morgan Gianola, M.S., for successfully proposing his doctoral thesis: “Idiomatics: Assessing Neurobiological Relationships Between Language, Culture, and Pain among Spanish-English Bilinguals” on neural responses associated with changes in pain ratings and physiological responses of bilinguals across English and Spanish contexts. To dissociate alterations in pain processing from activity associated with online language processing, he will also compare pain-responsive neural activity across languages to activity changes across language contexts during an explicitly linguistic task (i.e., semantic judgment). We are looking forward to helping Morgan conduct fMRI scans for this study and see the results.
Read MoreCheck out our new paper, “Clinician–Patient Racial/Ethnic Concordance Influences Racial/Ethnic Minority Pain: Evidence from Simulated Clinical Interactions, Pain Medicine” by our very own Steven R Anderson, Ph.D., Morgan Gianola, M.S., Jenna Perry Ruocchio, BS, and Elizabeth A Reynolds Losin, Ph.D., in the Pain Medicine Journal where we found that Black patients had reduced pain and pain-related physiological responses when treated by a doctor of their own race in simulated clinical interactions.
PDF Version|Press Release|Pain Med Journal Article
Read MoreCongratulations to Dr. Steven Anderson on his new postdoctoral position with Dr. Sean Mackey at Standford Systems Neuroscience and Pain Lab where he will be investigating the neurobiological correlates of social and contextual influences on chronic pain and opioid misuse.
Read MoreCongratulations to our first graduate student, Dr. Steven Anderson for successfully defending his doctoral dissertation: “Investigating how stoicism influences empathy for pain: A cross-cultural neuroimaging study”. Dr. Anderson received his Ph.D. in Psychology in the Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience Division in May from the University of Miami. We're looking forward to seeing what he does next!
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