Research Interests
- Cognitive Neuroscience of Aging (Affect & Cognition).
- Affective Disorders (Depression & Anxiety).
- Social Cognition (Social Neuroscience).
- Brain Imaging (fMRI & ERP).
- Individual Differences (Personality, Sex, Age).
- Affective Neuroscience (Emotion-Cognition Interactions).
Research Description
My main research interests concern the neural correlates of affective-cognitive interactions in healthy and clinical populations, as studied with brain imaging techniques (e.g., fMRI and ERP). My program can be divided into the following two main directions: 1. BASIC RESEARCH investigating the neural mechanisms underlying the impact of emotion on cognition in healthy participants. This direction focuses on identifying the mechanisms that are common to both the enhancing and the impairing effects of emotion on cognitive functions (e.g., enhanced memory for emotional events and enhanced susceptibility to emotional distraction, respectively), and on identifying the mechanisms that dissociate these two opposing effects of emotion on cognition. 2. TRANSLATIONAL RESEARCH investigating the role of individual differences in mediating the emotion-cognition interactions. This direction focuses on identifying the neural circuitry responsible for differential ability to experience, remember, and regulate emotions associated with age-, gender-, and personality-related differences, in both healthy and clinical cohorts. We investigate these issues using brain imaging methods (fMRI, ERP) in conjunction with other psychophysiological (electrodermal responses) and behavioral assessments (performance in cognitive and neuropsychological tasks, personality questionnaires). Investigation of these issues has direct implications for understanding the neural correlates of affective dysregulation observed in mood and anxiety disorders, which are characterized by pathological biases in processing negative emotions, intrusive recollection of distressing events, and increased emotional distractibility.
Awards and Honors
- Laird Cermak Award for Early Contributions to Memory Research from the Memory Disorders Research Society.
- Young Investigator Award from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression.
- NSERC Post-Doctoral Fellowship from the Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council of Canada.
- CPRF Award from the Canadian Psychiatric Research Foundation.
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor, Biomedical and Translational Sciences
Professor, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
Affiliate, Center for Social and Behavioral Science
Recent Publications
Bogdan, P. C., Dolcos, F., Moore, M., Kuznietsov, I., Culpepper, S. A., & Dolcos, S. (2023). Social Expectations are Primarily Rooted in Reciprocity: An Investigation of Fairness, Cooperation, and Trustworthiness. Cognitive Science, 47(8), Article e13326. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13326
Shipley, N. J., van Riper, C. J., Stewart, W. P., Chu, M., Stedman, R. C., & Dolcos, F. (2023). Pride and guilt as place-based affective antecedents to pro-environmental behavior. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, Article 1084741. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1084741
Bogdan, P. C., Moore, M., Kuznietsov, I., Frank, J. D., Federmeier, K. D., Dolcos, S., & Dolcos, F. (2022). Direct feedback and social conformity promote behavioral change via mechanisms indexed by centroparietal positivity: Electrophysiological evidence from a role‐swapping ultimatum game. Psychophysiology, 59(4), Article e13985. https://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.13985
Dolcos, S., Hu, Y., Williams, C., Bogdan, P. C., Hohl, K., Berenbaum, H., & Dolcos, F. (2021). Cultivating Affective Resilience: Proof-of-Principle Evidence of Translational Benefits From a Novel Cognitive-Emotional Training Intervention. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, Article 585536. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.585536
Dolcos, F., & Dolcos, S. (2021). Neural perspective on emotion. In Encyclopedia of Behavioral Neuroscience: Second Edition (Vol. 3-3, pp. 447-453). Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-819641-0.00161-4