Graduate Students

Elizabeth A. Ascher

I am in my 6th year in the clinical science program at Berkeley. Before graduate school, I 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, I study emotional functioning in individuals with neurodegenerative diseases—primarily frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease—and their close family caregivers. My current research is examining the perspectives of family caregivers on changes in patients' emotional expression, empathy, and emotional regulation. In this work, we are interested in two main questions: How do our laboratory assessments of emotional functioning compare to what partners and family members see in daily life with patients? How do caregivers' perspectives change over the course of these diseases? In addition to my current work, I have studied indicators of stress and burden in partners of dementia patients, including emotional language and relationship satisfaction. Through these studies, we hope 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 second year student in the Levenson lab. She is broadly interested in the psychosocial implications and biological correlates of emotional understanding. Her recent research has focused on Empathic Accuracy, or the ability to infer correctly the feelings of others, in long-term marriages. She received her BA and MA in psychology from Stanford University.

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

Personal relationships are an important part of the lives of almost every individual in the world. They can be a source of companionship, pleasure, and love. Unfortunately, they can also be a source of strain and difficulty. Because relationship discord is negatively associated with mental and physical well-being, it is critical to understand the mechanisms underlying poor relationship outcomes. Therefore, the primary focus of my research is to understand the destructive relationship processes that differentiate healthy, satisfied couples from those who are not. Further, I am particularly interested in gender differences in these processes and outcomes. I have largely pursued these research aims via investigations of the demand-withdraw interaction pattern. Demand-withdraw is a pattern in which one spouse, typically the wife, nags or pressures while the other spouse, typically the husband, avoids or withdraws. Demand-withdraw behaviors are associated with marital dissatisfaction. Because this interaction pattern is so common, pernicious, and gender-stereotyped, it has provided an invaluable window in which to explore my research questions.

I am currently a sixth year graduate student in the Clinical Science area. I completed my undergraduate education at Yale University, where I majored in Psychology with a focus on Behavioral Neuroscience.

Anita Madan

Anita received her BS in Psychology from McGill University, Montreal, QC, and is currently on internship at the San Francisco VA. Her interests are in the neural bases of emotional processes, interactions between emotion and cognition, and translational research that examines emotion disruption in psychopathology using basic science methods. She studied basic emotion-cognition interactions in Dr. Ann Kring's lab, where she completed her Master's Thesis. There, she investigated how different emotions enhance or impair the processing of verbal vs spatial information. Afterwards, she joined the Berkeley Psychophysiology Lab and has been working on the dementia project examining the neural basis of various emotion processes.

Benjamin Seider

I am a fifth year graduate student in the Berkeley Psychophysiology Lab. My research interests focus on how emotional processes develop throughout adulthood. One area of interest is in the emotional qualities of marital interactions between middle-aged and older long-term married couples when discussing an area of disagreement in their marriage. One focus of this work has been on how natural language usage reveals the couples’ underlying schematic representations of We-ness (We-words) and Separateness (Me/You-words). Specific questions address how these constructs are related to physiology and emotion behavior during the marital interactions as well as the overall satisfaction with the marriage, and further, how pronoun usage differs throughout adulthood. In another project on marital interactions, I am looking at how the middle-aged and older couples' emotional behavior changes over the course of three laboratory assessments spread out across a fifteen year span.

A new area of research for me concentrates on the emotion of sadness, an emotion that may become increasingly salient with age. Sadness may be particularly relevant in late life because of the increase in social, physical, and other losses associated with old age. We are currently assessing the subjective experience, emotional behavior, and physiology of younger, middle-aged, and older adults in response to films portraying themes of loss to determine if aging is associated with differences in emotional reactivity to these age-relevant stimuli.

Jocelyn Sze

Jocelyn Sze is a fourth year graduate student in the clinical psychology program at UC Berkeley. She graduated from Stanford University in 2004 with a B.A. in psychology. 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.

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.