Connected Science Community Psychology PhD Program

Professor Whitfield-Gabrieli’s primary mission is to understand the brain basis of psychiatric disorders and to promote translation of this knowledge into clinical practice.

Research in the Psychology of Misinformation Lab investigates what drives belief in inaccurate information, why certain individuals are predisposed to refrain from belief change even in the face of good corrective evidence, and how corrections can be designed to maximize impact.

Led by Dr. Brie Reid, we study how climate stress, environmental stressors, water insecurity, metal exposures, climate-change induced food insecurity can impact human development through prenatal/postnatal stress physiology and nutrient mechanisms.

The Belonging and Social Identities Lab (BASIL) seeks to: 1) produce high quality, impactful, reproducible research that advances understanding on the topics of identity, self-concept, discrimination, and health for understudied populations, particularly people who hold two identities simultaneously; 2) contribute to the broader field of social psychology by increasing the diversity of researchers at all levels, participants in studies, and topics of study; and 3) improve the culture of academia through steadfast commitment to core

Led by Drs. Aaron Seitz and Susanne Jaeggi, our lab strives to improve your brain’s fitness. We research, test, and disseminate evidence-based, scientifically optimized brain fitness games that assist you in real life with memory, vision, hearing, learning, and more. We have a track record of making our tested procedures publicly available so that our innovations help our community and the world.

The Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory (IASL) studies emotions what they are, and how they work— using experiential, behavioral, psychophysiological, and brain-imaging techniques. The IASL is located at Northeastern University, with a secondary site at Mass General Hospital.

The Language Acquisition and Brain Lab (QLAB), directed by Dr. Zhenghan Qi, is dedicated to studying the brain organization of language development. We use a variety of behavioral and neuroimaging techniques such as eye-tracking, EEG, and MRI. We investigate how the neural organization for language processing changes from childhood through adulthood and how differently language networks function in neurodevelopmental disorders.

Work in the Subjectivity Lab focuses on understanding the subjective point of view of the mind: How we perceive the world around us, how the brain creates conscious experiences, and how introspection opens a window into our own minds. With an interdisciplinary approach that integrates tools from psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy, we aim to provide an “objective” understanding of intrinsically “subjective” phenomena involved in visual processing, attention, awareness, and metacognition.

The central theme of research in the Kwon Lab is to understand how people with visual impairment see and recognize the world around them. To this end, they study how the visual system deals with four major aspects of visual deficits that often occur in impaired vision: blur, low contrast, visual field loss, and abnormal binocular interaction. Our research involves psychophysical, eye tracking, fMRI and computational investigations in normal and visually impaired humans.