Plenary Speakers
Thursday, April 11th, 14:45 ET
Keynote: Deconstructing Emotions
Questions about the nature of emotion are some of the most enduring in psychology and neuroscience. We have been studying emotion scientifically for over a century, but answers to questions about the nature of these important states have remained elusive. Traditionally, attempts to weigh in on the mechanisms of emotion have used a single level of analysis and focus almost exclusively on cognitive, neurophysiological, or cultural mechanisms. In this talk, I discuss work that spans all three. I will begin by showing experimental evidence that emotions are mental states characterized by cognitive features such as valence, arousal, and situated semantic meanings. Next, I’ll demonstrate that these features are the product of interactions amongst distributed brain networks that predictively regulate visceromotor outputs by making best guesses about adaptive actions. Finally, I’ll close by showing that such predictions are learned via experience within particularly cultural contexts. Together, this work forms the basis of a new constructionist model in which emotions are both deeply embodied and encultured states.
Kristen Lindquist
University of North Carolina
Kristen Lindquist, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where she directs the Carolina Affective Science Lab and the Social Psychology graduate program. She is additionally a faculty member in the Developmental Psychology graduate program and the Human Neuroimaging Group in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and the Biomedical Research Imaging Center and the Neurobiology Curriculum in the School of Medicine.
Kristen’s research has helped to establish evidence for a constructionist theory of emotion that explains how the complex emotions experienced in daily life are composed of more basic neural mechanisms. To address questions about the nature of emotion, her research employs tools from social psychology, cognitive psychology, psychophysiology, neuroscience, linguistics, and cultural evolution. Her work is funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and private foundations.
Kristen received her B.A. in Psychology and English from Boston College in 2004, her Ph.D. in Psychology from Boston College in 2010, and she was a Harvard University Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative postdoctoral fellow from 2010-2012, during which she was affiliated with the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, the Department of Neurology at Harvard Medical School, and the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at the Massachusetts General Hospital.
She is the recipient of multiple honors including being named a “Rising Star in Psychological Science” by the Association for Psychological Science, a Fellow of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. She has received multiple awards for both teaching and mentorship, including the Provost’s Johnstone Excellence in Teaching Award. In 2023, she was voted President-Elect of the Society for Affective Science.
When not doing science, Kristen can be found playing with her two young kids, reading fiction, gardening, and being outdoors.
Friday, April 12th, 10:30 PT
Early Career Award Talk
Corticolimbic and Connectome-Wide Representations of Anxious Traits
The Early Career Award recognizes an early-stage investigator who has made significant contributions to Social and Affective Neuroscience in terms of outstanding scholarship and service to the field. The winner of the award will receive a $500 prize and be invited to give a short talk at the annual SANS meeting.
Moderator: Aaron Heller, University of Miami
Justin Minue Kim
Sungkyunkwan University
Emotion is a powerful psychological state that can determine how we engage in human interactions, and how we manage our affect is a crucial piece to being successful in the social world. In this talk, I will highlight our lab’s efforts to leverage the interconnectivity of brain networks to identify neural systems supporting emotion regulation by linking ambiguity processing with anxious traits. Traditionally, these include neural circuits centered on the amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex, but recent work suggests that macro-scale brain networks that support socioemotional functions may also have important implications for mental health. More broadly, I will illustrate that understanding the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying anxiety is enhanced by considering its universal (i.e., shared among individuals) and idiosyncratic (i.e., variable across individuals) features.
Friday, April 12th, 14:45 ET
Presidential Symposium: Making Memories in Mice
Understanding how the brain uses information is a fundamental goal of neuroscience. Several human disorders (ranging from autism spectrum disorder to PTSD to Alzheimer’s disease) may stem from disrupted information processing. Therefore, this basic knowledge is not only critical for understanding normal brain function, but also vital for the development of new treatment strategies for these disorders. Memory may be defined as the retention over time of internal representations gained through experience, and the capacity to reconstruct these representations at later times. Long-lasting physical brain changes (‘engrams’) are thought to encode these internal representations. The concept of a physical memory trace likely originated in ancient Greece, although it wasn’t until 1904 that Richard Semon first coined the term ‘engram’. Despite its long history, finding a specific engram has been challenging, likely because an engram is encoded at multiple levels (epigenetic, synaptic, cell assembly). My lab is interested in understanding how specific neurons are recruited or allocated to an engram, and how neuronal membership in an engram may change over time or with new experience. Here I will describe data in our efforts to understand memories in mice.
Moderator: Aaron Heller, University of Miami
Sponsored by:
Sheena Josselyn
The Hospital for Sick Children & University of Toronto
Sheena Josselyn is a Senior Scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) and a Professor in the departments of Psychology and Physiology at the University of Toronto in Canada. Dr. Josselyn holds a Canada Research Chair in Brain Mechanisms underlying Memory, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Fellow of the National Academy of Medicine (US).
Her undergraduate degrees in Psychology and Life Sciences and a Masters degree in Clinical Psychology were granted by Queen’s University in Kingston (Canada). Sheena received a PhD in Neuroscience/Psychology from the University of Toronto with Dr. Franco Vaccarino as her supervisor. She conducted post-doctoral work with Dr. Mike Davis (Yale University) and Dr. Alcino Silva (UCLA).
Dr. Josselyn received numerous awards, including the Innovations in Psychopharmacology Award from the Canadian College of Neuropsychopharmacology (CCNP), the Effron Award from the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP), the Andrew Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences and the Betty & David Koester Award for Brain Research.
Dr. Josselyn is interested in understanding how the brain encodes, stores and uses information. Her primary model organism is mice. However, several human disorders (ranging from autism spectrum disorder to Alzheimer’s disease) may stem from disrupted information processing. Therefore, this basic knowledge in mice is not only critical for understanding normal brain function, but also vital for the development of new treatment strategies for these disorders.
Saturday, April 13th, 12:30 ET
Mid-Career Award Talk
Towards a Computational Social and Affective Science
As a way to better recognize our membership for their work, we have introduced the Mid-Career Award for 2024. The award recognizes a mid-stage investigator who has made significant contributions to Social and Affective Neuroscience in terms of outstanding scholarship and service to the field. The winner of the award will receive a $500 prize, complimentary registration to the 2024 conference in Toronto, and will be invited to give a short talk at the annual meeting.
Moderator: Kateri McRae, University of Denver
Luke Chang
Dartmouth College
Psychology is the only scientific discipline in which the subject matter (i.e., the human mind) is also the tool of investigation. Social and affective psychological phenomena are particularly vexing as they arise from internal subjective thoughts, feelings, and motivations that are rarely directly observable. In this talk, I will provide examples illustrating how our lab has grappled with challenges pertaining to representative experimental designs, objective measurements, and quantitative modeling. Directly addressing the immense complexity of our discipline to build a cumulative science will likely require a broader commitment to moving beyond our comfort zones and engineering new innovative methods, collaborating with other scientific disciplines, and engaging and supporting our peers.
Saturday, April 13th, 15:30 ET
Distinguished Scholar Presentation
The Inherent Reward of Social Connection
The Distinguished Scholar Award recognizes the broad scope and potentially integrative nature of scholarship in social and affective neuroscience. It honors a scholar who has made distinctively valuable research contributions across his or her career in areas by significantly advancing our understanding of the biological basis of social and affective processes or expanding the core of social and affective neuroscience discipline.
Moderator: Aaron Heller, University of Miami
Mauricio Delgado
Rutgers University
From winning a raffle to receiving praise from a colleague, experiences of reward elicit positive feelings, shape our behavior, and influence our emotional well-being. Among the most sought-after rewards in our environment are those of a social nature. Indeed, the value derived from positive social interactions fosters the ability to share perspectives and preferences, in turn encouraging new connections with others, reinforcing existing social bonds, and boosting overall well-being. This talk underscores the role of the brain’s reward system in processing the motivational features of social rewards and supporting the development of protective factors against negative affect. I will focus on how an enriched social context, such as the level of closeness between individuals, can enhance reward-related neural responses and influence the experience of reward, subsequent behavior, and reactions to acute stress. Additionally, I will highlight mechanisms that facilitate learning about others and promote social connection.
Thank You to Our 2024 Sponsors & Exhibitors!
