My work investigates the basic cognitive and emotional processes that contribute to incentive-guided decision-making, emotion regulation, and psychopathology. As a post-doctoral fellow working with Diego Pizzagalli, I have contributed to neuroimaging studies that suggest that early life stress, depression, and anhedonia are all associated with weak basal ganglia responses to monetary rewards. Given that memories of prior rewards and punishments often guide our ongoing choices, I am currently extending this work by examining whether reward-related retrieval deficits also contribute to anhedonia.

In a separate line of research that began during my doctoral research with Kevin LaBar, I am examining how conscious regulation strategies affect memory for emotional stimuli. This work is motivated by the fact that although laboratory studies consistently reveal a recall advantage for emotionally arousing items versus neutral items, it is not clear if memory is affected by emotion regulation. To begin to address this issue, we recently showed that using reappraisal to consciously increase or decrease the emotional impact of negative pictures lead to improved free recall for those pictures, but had no effect on perceptual priming. In ongoing work, we are attempting to determine how reliable this phenomenon is, what its boundary conditions are, and whether it can help us understand memory problems associated with various forms of psychopathology.