Elizabeth A. Ascher
Elizabeth is in the clinical science program at Berkeley, and recently completed her clinical internship at UCSF-SF General Hospital. Before graduate school, she studied cognitive neuroscience at Colgate University, and then worked with researchers in New York on studies of posttraumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. At BPL, Elizabeth studies emotional functioning in individuals with neurodegenerative diseases -- primarily frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease -- and their close family caregivers. Her current research is examining the perspectives of family caregivers on changes in patients' emotional expression, empathy, and emotional regulation. Elizabeth is interested in two main questions: (1) How do our laboratory assessments of emotional functioning compare to what partners and family members see in daily life with patients? (2) How do caregivers' perspectives change over the course of these diseases? In addition to her current work, Elizabeth has studied indicators of stress and burden in partners of dementia patients, including emotional language and relationship satisfaction. Through these studies, she hopes to contribute to improvements in dementia diagnosis and to identify factors that can inform interventions for families grappling with these illnesses.
Lian Bloch
Lian Bloch is a fifth year student in the UC Berkeley Clinical Science program. Her graduate research has investigated the link between emotional functioning and well-being, both with respect to the quality of relationships and individual health. Given that most emotion occurs in our closest relationships, Lian's research has focused on adaptive emotional functioning in the context of long-term marriages. Her research has focused on the link between: a) spousal empathy and marital satisfaction, and b) spousal anger expression and cardiovascular health. Her dissertation examined the link between spontaneous emotion regulation during spousal conflict and marital satisfaction across the lifespan.
Jim Casey
Jim Casey is a third year student in the Clinical Science program. His research interests include the role of emotion in social relationships and the effects of emotion on cognition. He is currently working on a project studying emotional and behavioral mimicry in married couples. Jim is originally from Connecticut and received a B.A. in Psychology from Yale University.
Janet Eckart
Janet Eckart is a graduate student in the clinical psychology program at UC Berkeley. She received her BA in psychology from Stanford University in 2004, where she worked with Professor James Gross on studies of emotion regulation in college students. She received her MA from UC Berkeley in 2008. As a member of the Berkeley Psychophysiology Lab, Janet works on a project examining how neurological degeneration affects emotional processes; she is particularly interested in how disgust reactivity may be compromised in patients with frontotemporal dementia. Janet worked as an intern in the Berkeley Psychology Clinic for four years, and served as the assistant to the Associate Director of the Clinic for two years.
Anett Gyurak
Anett is working towards her doctoral degree in psychology at UC Berkeley. As a Hungarian native, she completed her undergraduate studies in psychology at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest. Her research interests are focused on emotion regulation, its neurological, physiological and behavioral concomitants. She studies this question using a variety of methods, for example autonomic nervous system physiology, fMRI, neuropsyhological tests, and self-report measures in kids and adults. With these converging techniques she hopes to answer several important questions about the origins and active ingredients of emotion regulatory ability, and ultimately hope to design intervention techniques aimed to cultivate them.
Sarah Holley
Because relationship discord is negatively associated with mental and physical well-being, it is critical to understand the mechanisms underlying poor relationship outcomes. The primary focus of Sarah's research is to understand the destructive relationship processes that differentiate healthy, satisfied couples from those who are not. She is particularly interested in the factors that contribute to gender differences in these processes and outcomes. Sarah is currently a seventh year graduate student in the Clinical Science area and is completing her clinical internship at UCSF. She completed her undergraduate education at Yale University, where she majored in Psychology with a focus on Behavioral Neuroscience.
Sandy Lwi
Sandy Lwi is a second-year student in the Clinical Science program. She is interested in understanding what motivates people to act in prosocial ways and is currently working on a project that allows her to examine individual differences in how empathy is expressed. Specifically, her research interests have three foci: 1) understanding how empathy changes across the lifespan, 2) examining the neurobiological components that are crucial for generating empathic responses, and 3) applying research findings to clinical populations. Sandy received her B.A. in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley.
Anna Sapozhnikova
Anna Sapozhnikova is a second year student in the Clinical Science
program at UC Berkeley. Currently she is working on a project
examining the role of COMT gene polymorphism in different types of
emotion regulation, namely suppression and reappraisal, in healthy
adults and in clinical populations. She is also interested in
understanding and quantifying interpersonal dynamics of couples where
one partner is diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease,
specifically frontotemporal dementia or Alzheimer's disease. Anna is
originally from Ukraine but lived in Massachusetts for many years and
received her B.A in Psychology from Bard College.
Benjamin Seider
Ben is a sixth-year graduate student in the Berkeley Psychophysiology Lab. His research primarily investigates the emotions and interpersonal communication dynamics of married couples discussing areas of conflict in their relationships. Specifically, examining couples�: (1) schematic representations of togetherness vs. separateness as revealed through their natural language usage (we-words vs. me/you-words), (2) emotion as indicated by physiology, behavior, and self-report, and (3) interrelations between language, emotion, and marital satisfaction. He has also examined how these processes change throughout the adult lifespan, both in middle-aged and older couples in long-term marriages as well as in couples where one spouse has been diagnosed with either Frontotemporal Dementia, a disease marked by profound socioemotional deficits, or Alzheimer�s Disease. In an additional line of research, he is examining sadness, an emotion particularly relevant in late life because of the increase in social, physical, and cognitive losses associated with aging. In this project he is examining age differences in the sadness reactivity (subjective experience, expressive behavior, physiology) of young, middle-aged, and old adults in response to sad films.
Michaela Simpson
Michaela Simpson is a second year graduate student in the Clinical Science program at UC Berkeley. She received her B.A. from Stanford University, where she majored in International Relations. Formerly an observer of the behavior of nations, Michaela now focuses on the behavior of humans. Current research pursuits include studying sensory processing and hedonic judgment and their relation to behavior, brain, and culture. In addition, she is investigating the biological bases of prosocial behavior, looking specifically at the biological response to distress as a way to understand prosocial behavior..
Jocelyn Sze
Jocelyn Sze is a fifth year graduate student in the clinical science program, and she received a B.A. in psychology at Stanford University. Originally from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Jocelyn has two main research foci: (1) the development of prosocial emotions (particularly empathy and compassion) across the adult lifespan, and (2) the mechanisms through which body-awareness meditation may improve emotional well-being. Jocelyn is currently working on a study in BPL examining empathy and aging in adults ages 20-80. Ultimately, she hopes to develop and validate socio-culturally sensitive interventions that may promote emotional well-being in adults, with an emphasis on identifying the mechanisms of change within a particular intervention.
Alice Verstaen
Alice Verstaen is a first-year student in the Clinical Science program. She received her B.A. in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. Alice is currently working on the Dementia and Emotion project of the lab, and is interested in the effects of patients' dementia on their caregivers. She is particularly interested in the factors that allow certain caregivers to cope better than others, focusing on interactions between patients and caregivers, and emotional functioning of patients.
Joyce Yuan
Joyce is a sixth-year student in the clinical science program, and she completed her undergraduate degree at Amherst College. Her research interests include emotion and attention, coherence among emotion response measures (physiological, behavioral, and experiential), and deficits in emotional functioning in clinical populations. She is currently working on a study of visual processing of emotional images in patients with frontotemporal lobar dementia. She is interested in how scanning of emotional images might relate to deficits in emotional reactivity and emotion recognition in this population. She has also worked on studies examining the temporal coherence among emotion response systems in healthy individuals and married couples. In addition, she is interested in emotional functioning in psychiatric disorders and has conducted studies on the prediction and experience of emotion in depression.