Past Colloquia

Title: Reward Processing in the Social Brain

From winning a raffle to receiving praise from a colleague, the experience of reward elicits positive emotions, shapes our behavior and influences our emotional well-being.  Central to processing rewards is the role of the striatum - the input unit of the basal ganglia and a key node in a putative human reward circuit.  This talk will first describe early efforts aimed at characterizing a reward-related signal in the human striatum, its association with other brain regions and...

Title: "Memory consolidation during sleep and implications for mental health". 

Title: The role of empathy in morality: A force that can bind or blind us    

 Abstract: Empathy can be a strong motivation for moral behavior, but its influence can also have the opposite effect. People who are concerned for the well-being of others are more likely to help, care for them, and respect them. Empathy provides information for moral decision-making, which can supplement information based on reasoning, rational belief, and inference. However, empathy is limited and fragile, thus not always a reliable source of information in moral...

Title:"Communicating Behavior: Bottom-Up Processes of Social Influence" 

Abstract: This talk will begin with an analysis of interindividual processes of person perception and communication that unfold in brief verbal messages such as those on social media. I will describe experiments designed to establish whether merely alluding to behaviors can influence others to perform those behaviors. After discussing the processes underlying the effects of interindividual messages, I will present big data...

Title: TBA

URL for more information: https://psych.la.psu.edu/directory/yo-jackson-professor-of-psychology

Title: Human happiness in high resolution: Insights from large-scale
         experience-sampling