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, Neuroscience Program
Professor, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
Affiliate, Center for Social & Behavioral Science
Recent Publications
Bogdan, P. C., Dolcos, S., Buetti, S., Lleras, A., & Dolcos, F. (2024). Investigating the suitability of online eye tracking for psychological research: Evidence from comparisons with in-person data using emotion–attention interaction tasks. Behavior Research Methods, 56(3), 2213-2226. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02143-z
Schiller, D., Yu, A. N. C., Alia-Klein, N., Becker, S., Cromwell, H. C., Dolcos, F., Eslinger, P. J., Frewen, P., Kemp, A. H., Pace-Schott, E. F., Raber, J., Silton, R. L., Stefanova, E., Williams, J. H. G., Abe, N., Aghajani, M., Albrecht, F., Alexander, R., Anders, S., ... Lowe, L. (2024). The Human Affectome. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 158, Article 105450. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105450
Bogdan, P. C., Iordan, A. D., Shobrook, J., & Dolcos, F. (2023). ConnSearch: A framework for functional connectivity analysis designed for interpretability and effectiveness at limited sample sizes. NeuroImage, 278, Article 120274. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2023.120274
Bogdan, P. C., Dolcos, S., Federmeier, K. D., Lleras, A., Schwarb, H., & Dolcos, F. (Accepted/In press). Emotional dissociations in temporal associations: opposing effects of arousal on memory for details surrounding unpleasant events. Cognition and Emotion. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2023.2270196
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