Start date: Flexible.
Location: UCL or MIT or both.
Topic: Decision neuroscience/ Computational psychiatry/ Information seeking/ Belief formation.
Experience: Computational modelling and/or neuroimaging and/or NLP
PI: Tali Sharot
Lab: https://affectivebrain.com/
For more information, questions or to apply, please contact: Tali Sharot at t.sharot@ucl.ac.uk
THE AFFECTIVE BRAIN LAB investigates how affect (the experience of emotion) affects human cognition and behaviour in normal brain function and in affective disorders (such as depression and anxiety).
WE STUDY how motivation and emotion (generated in response to an internal thought, external reward and punishment, or social interaction) determine our expectations of the future, our everyday decisions, our memories, and our ability to learn. By understanding these basic processes, we aim to identify ways to encourage behavioural change that enhance well-being.
OUR APPROACH is multidisciplinary; We tackle questions traditionally studied by social psychologists and behavioural economists utilizing brain imaging (fMRI), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), pharmacological manipulations, neuropsychiatric methods, computational models, genetics techniques, and behavioural experiments. We collaborate with psychologists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and behavioural economists worldwide (see our collaborators). Our aim is to offer new insight into brain function in both health and disease.
THE PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS are considerable, including policy formulation to correct for human biases as well as clinical applications in the treatment of brain dysfunction.