The Affect & Cognition Lab (ACL) is an interdisciplinary research group focusing on the psychological and neural foundations of emotion and cognition. We employ a variety of methodological approaches including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), peripheral psychophysiology, computational modeling, and rat models to investigate how the brain gives rise to complex mental events, such as emotions, attention, learning and memory. The principal investigators, Drs. Adam Anderson and Eve De Rosa, are faculty in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto.

Our research explores the psychological and neural underpinnings of the emotions, from their facial and physiological expression to their interactions with cognitive processes such as attention and memory.

Current research foci include: (1a) What are the neural correlates of our capacity to maintain both task-relevant and irrelevant (i.e. ignored) information over time? (1b) Are discrete systems engaged by shifts in the attribution of relevance when task demands change? (2) How are these systems affected by normative ageing (3) How are these systems influenced by emotional states?

This research program is investigating the evolution of disgust in humans, from its apparent roots in protecting the body from harmful substances to its potential involvement in regulating advanced social behaviour and cognition.

This research focuses on the neural predictors of depressive relapse, explaining how mindfulness training reduces the risk of such relapse, and more generally how biases in self-regulation are created and altered, both in terms of subjective and neural/physiological accounts.

This research integrates computational models, subjective rating studies, and perceptual psychophysics to understand facial expressive behavior and its relation to emotion. We analyze static and dynamic configurations of muscle and surface features on the face for their egocentric function and perceptual significance.

Examining a special group of participants who underwent the same traumatic experience, this ressearch studies the modulating effects of emotional experiences on attention. Emphasis is placed on learning to become reactive to normatively neutral stimuli, and the neural differences that make these attentional changes less cognitive and more reflexive.