Congratulations to our 4th-year graduate student, Morgan Gianola, M.S., for successfully proposing his doctoral thesis: “Idiomatics: Assessing Neurobiological Relationships Between Language, Culture, and Pain among Spanish-English Bilinguals” on neural responses associated with changes in pain ratings and physiological responses of bilinguals across English and Spanish contexts. To dissociate alterations in pain processing from activity associated with online language processing, he will also compare pain-responsive neural activity across languages to activity changes across language contexts during an explicitly linguistic task (i.e., semantic judgment). We are looking forward to helping Morgan conduct fMRI scans for this study and see the results.

Congratulations to Dr. Steven Anderson on his new postdoctoral position with Dr. Sean Mackey at Standford Systems Neuroscience and Pain Lab where he will be investigating the neurobiological correlates of social and contextual influences on chronic pain and opioid misuse.

Congratulations to our first graduate student, Dr. Steven Anderson for successfully defending his doctoral dissertation: “Investigating how stoicism influences empathy for pain: A cross-cultural neuroimaging study”. Dr. Anderson received his Ph.D. in Psychology in the Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience Division in May from the University of Miami. We're looking forward to seeing what he does next!

Double the congratulations to our graduate student, Morgan Gianola!
He was awarded a "Critical Language Scholarship" to spend the summer in Florianopolis, Brazil focusing on intensive Portuguese language study but unfortunately due to the coronavirus outbreak, the program was canceled.
He was also selected as an alternate for a Boren Fellowship to conduct a cross-cultural neuroimaging study at Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio Grande Do Sul while also continuing his studies of the Portuguese language and learning Brazilian culture during the coming academic year.

Congratulations to our very own Steven R. Anderson for not only successfully defending his doctoral thesis but for also receiving the Kirk R. Danhour Memorial Award from the Psychology Department for the Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience Division! This prestigious honor is awarded each spring to a graduating psychology graduate student in each division. Students are selected by the faculty based on outstanding academic performance, progress, and quality of research, leadership, social integration, involvement in departmental activities, and development of clinically-oriented skills. Steven has surely earned this award and continues to shine in our lab even during these times of uncertainty.

Check out our new collaborative paper, “Multiple Brain Networks Mediating Stimulus–Pain Relationships in Humans”, introducing a new high-dimensional mediation analysis technique to identify brain network-level mediators of pain. Brain mediators including areas outside the traditional pain-associated regions were identified as better predictors for pain ratings compared to previous neural metrics. It was published in Oxford’s Journal: Cerebral Cortex. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhaa048

Here is the downloadable PDF.

Check out our new paper, "Improving Practices for Selecting a Subset of Important Predictors in Psychology: An Application to Predicting Pain", in collaboration with fellow UM Psychology Professor, Sierra Bainter, and Tor Wager of Dartmouth College applying a variable selection technique not commonly used in psychology, stochastic search variable selection (SSVS), to look for the best sociocultural and brain predictors of pain published today in Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science (AMPPS). https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245919885617

Here is the downloadable PDF.

Check out our new paper, "Neural and sociocultural mediators of ethnic differences in pain", from the Social and Cultural Neuroscience Lab - UM in collaboration with the Cognitive Affective Neuroscience Lab published today in Nature Human Behaviour. A common misconception is that any difference you see between groups of people, particularly in the brain, must be an intrinsic difference, rooted in our biology. But the differences found in our study were related to people's life experiences, including racial discrimination. Here is the full PDF and a link to the University of Miami Press Release for a nice summary: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_re…/2020-02/uom-bsi020120.php

Happy New Year from the Social and Cultural Neuroscience (SCN) Lab! We cannot wait to share all of our upcoming 2020 research updates and news with all of you!

The Social and Cultural Neuroscience Lab celebrated Halloween with Dr. Uddin’s Lab, Dr. Jha’s Lab, Dr. Britton’s Lab, and Dr. McIntosh’s Lab with spooky music, trick or treats, and fun costumes.

Our 3rd-year graduate student, Morgan Gianola, successfully defended his Master’s Thesis, “Idiomatics: Influences of Linguistic and Cultural Context on Pain Responses in Spanish-English Bilinguals”, on October 31st, 2019. Pictured from left to right are Beatriz Yepes (one of the research assistants that helped on the project), Dr. Maria Llabre (on Morgan’s defense committee), Dr. Elizabeth Losin ( Morgan’s mentor), Morgan Gianola, and Dr. Caleb Everett (on Morgan’s defense committee).