Every year, the University of Miami Psychology Department selects one student per area as an Ironson Distinguished Speaker. This year, our graduate student Steven Anderson received that honor for the Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience area of our department, for his work on the neural bases of expressive suppression and neural empathy for pain. Associated with this award is a cash prize, as well as the opportunity to present his work at the Ironson Distinguished Speakers Student Colloquium, which took place on Thursday, April 25, at 3:30 PM. Steven gave a talk titled “Expressive suppression modulation of the empathic neural response to pain”. Great job, Steven!

Research assistant Taylor Bak also volunteers as the Vice President of Internal Relations for U of Miami’s Girls Inspiring Rising Ladies in STEM (G. I. R. L. S.) group, which organized a “STEMinist Day” event today. As part of this event, Taylor put together a tour of the Cox Neuroscience Annex for the girls of PACE Miami, a “prevention and intervention program that addresses the needs of [at-risk] girls from the ages of 11-17”. The aim of this tour was to inspire these girls to consider STEM careers, occupations that are largely male-dominated and are not often presented as realistic options to school-age girls.

Today Morgan Gianola traveled to the Conference of Florida Graduate Schools to present his poster titled “Selection and characterization of cultural priming stimuli for activation of Hispanic and US-American cultural mindsets among Spanish-English bilinguals.” He first presented this poster at the Graduate and Postdoctoral Research Symposium at the University of Miami on March 7. There, his presentation was awarded “Best Poster Presentation” in the Health and Life Sciences category, and he was selected to represent the UM in that category at the Conference of Florida Graduate Schools poster session today, joining graduate students from around the state at the hosting institution, Florida International University.

Liz Losin was selected as a speaker for a cross-disciplinary panel on “Elucidating Factors Contributing to Health Disparities in Pain: Applying the National Institutes on Aging Health Disparities Research Framework” at the annual meeting on the American Pain Society. Liz gave her talk on “Sociocultural and neural mechanisms of ethnic disparities in pain and pain treatment” yesterday at the 3 PM panel. Graduate student Steven Anderson also traveled to Milwaukee for the conference, where he presented a poster titled “Doctor-patient racial/ethnic concordance predicts pain: Evidence from simulated clinical interactions“, which uses data from our lab’s doctor-patient simulation paradigm.

For the second year in a row, the Cox Neuroscience Annex and UM’s Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience program enjoyed each other’s company at a Halloween potluck. We all had way too many sweets and too much fun! SCN Lab members Liz Losin, Steven Anderson, Morgan Gianola, Jenna Perry, and Beatriz Yepes (pictured) were able to take some time out today for the Halloween festivities.

Graduate student Steven Anderson presented his research on the relationship between emotion regulation ability and empathy for pain at the first Mind & Life International Research Institute in Kyoto, Japan, held September 1-5. Steven presented data that he collected in Shihui Han's Culture and Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Peking University under the auspices of the National Science Foundation (NSF) East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes (EAPSI) Program. Investigating how belief in the social appropriateness of outward pain expression relates to emotion regulation and empathy for pain, Steven found that individuals who habitually suppress their emotions are more likely to deem outward pain expression as inappropriate. He also found neuroimaging evidence that suggests that greater belief that outward pain expression is inappropriate is associated with decreases in activity in brain regions previously associated with visual and empathic responding when passively viewing faces of individuals in pain.

Miami: The University of Miami Magazine featured Dr. Elizabeth Losin and the lab's research on the intersection between pain perception and cultural disparities in their faculty spotlight "Faculty Files" section. The article discussed the lab's current lines of research, as well as how Liz's research interests developed to include work on pain and opioid prescribing. Read the full article here.

Summer intern Efrain Rodriguez Sierra presented a poster on his summer research project entitled "Evaluating components of bicultural identity in Puerto Ricans and other Latin Americans residing in the United States" as a part of his participation in The Leadership Alliance Program. Efra's project demonstrated that level of ethnic identification with images evocative of Hispanic culture, but not images of American culture, is impacted by age of arrival into the US. He also found that ethnic identification with representations from both cultural backgrounds was not significantly different between Puerto Ricans and other Latino Americans residing in the United States. This finding demonstrates Latino Americans in general share more similarities than differences in their patterns of bicultural involvement.

Graduate student Steven Anderson presented his research on the emotion regulation strategy expressive suppression at the annual meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM) in Singapore, held June 17-21. He presented data that he collected in Shihui Han's Culture and Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Peking University as part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes (EAPSI) Program. Steven found common recruitment of prefrontal cortical regions during the latter part of engaging in expressive suppression to both pain faces and negative affective pictures. He found significant differences in brain activity between the two stimulus types in the right amygdala, with greater amygdala activity toward pain faces vs. negative affective pictures especially in the earlier part of engaging in expressive suppression.

Each year, neuroimaging researchers from UM and FIU gather together for Brainhack: a one-day conference that involves a series of faculty talks, collaborative "hacking" sessions, and a trainee data blitz. Today, at Brainhack 2018, SCN Lab members Steven Anderson, Morgan Gianola, and Jenna Perry each gave brief talks on their respective lines of research. Great job, everyone!

Congratulations to Efrain Rodriguez who has been selected for a fully paid summer internship with The Leadership Alliance's Summer Research Early Identification Program. Efrain is a current junior at the University of Puerto Rico. This summer, Efrain will be working with graduate student Morgan Gianola on a project investigating pain perception in English-Spanish bilinguals.