Listen to Dr. Losin talk about the health disparities across gender in the With Her in Pain podcast series. 

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Dr. Losin was featured in the With Her in Pain podcast, talking about the health disparities across genders. With Her in Pain is a podcast series that investigates sex and gender bias in medicine, through professional views and patient stories. 

https://anchor.fm/with-her-in-pain/episodes/Ep-4-Gender-biases-in-pain-evaluation-and-treatment-In-conversation-with-Dr--Elizabeth-A--Reynolds-Losin-e18tkkn

SCN lab welcomes Suhwan Gim!

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Suhwan Gim will be joining us for the 21/22 school year as a visiting graduate student. Suhwan is a 4th year Ph.D. student in Biomedical Engineering, at the Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), advised by Dr. Choong-Wan Woo, in the Computational Cognitive Affective Neuroscience Laboratory (COCOAN). Suhwan received his B.A. in psychology from SKKU, Seoul, South Korea, during which he focused on social and cultural psychology. Currently, his research interests are to examine behavioral and neural mechanisms of how environments including social contexts, developmental background, or cultures influence pain and emotion and understand how psychological and biological health contribute to each other.

The lab welcomes our new graduate student Olivia Chen!

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The lab welcomes out new graduate student Olivia Chen. Olivia graduated from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2018 with a Bachelor of Science in Statistics and Psychology. Olivia has worked as a clinical research coordinator at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital with people affected by sickle cell anemia.

New Collaborative Paper Published Featuring UM CBN Ph.D. Graduates

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New Collaborative Paper Published Featuring UM CBN Ph.D. Graduates

Check out our new paper, “Modeling neural and self-reported factors of affective distress in the relationship between pain and working memory in healthy individuals,” by recent graduate students Steven Anderson, Ph.D., and Joanna Witkin, Ph.D., in collaboration with Taylor Bolt, Ph.D., Claire Ashton-James, Ph.D., and Elizabeth Losin, Ph.D. The article was published in Neuropsychologia, an international journal in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience. The authors analyzed open-science neuroimaging and self-report data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP). The study analyzed data from healthy individuals experiencing pain within the past seven days. The authors found that higher pain intensity in the past seven days was associated with reduced working memory performance and increased activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), a brain region involved in pain, affective distress, and cognition. The authors also found that healthy participants with pain had different levels of activity in the vmPFC during the working memory task than healthy participants who did not report pain. Interestingly, this activity pattern was more similar to patients with chronic pain than healthy patients exposed to pain manipulations in a laboratory.

Pre-proof Journal PDF Version|Press Release

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Morgan Gianola's Cultural Priming Image Paper Published!

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Morgan Gianola's Cultural Priming Image Paper Published!

Check out our new paper, “Selection and Characterization of Cultural Priming Stimuli for the Activation of Spanish and English Cultural Mindsets Among Hispanic/Latino Bilinguals in the United States,” by our very own Morgan Gianola, M.S., Beatriz E. Yepes, B.A., and Elizabeth A. Reynolds Losin, Ph.D., in the Social Psychology journal where we empirically selected, and validated images that prime people’s minds for Hispanic culture or US-American culture. This set was tested with Hispanic/Latinx participants that spoke English and Spanish fluently. You can find these images with their descriptions and ratings, as well as how to use them in your own study here on Open Science Framework (OSF): The Hispanic and the U.S.A. Culturally Priming Image Descriptions and Ratings.

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Morgan Gianola's Successful Doctoral Thesis Proposal

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Morgan Gianola's Successful Doctoral Thesis Proposal

Congratulations to our 4th-year graduate student, Morgan Gianola, M.S., for successfully proposing his doctoral thesis: “Idiomatics: Assessing Neurobiological Relationships Between Language, Culture, and Pain among Spanish-English Bilinguals” on neural responses associated with changes in pain ratings and physiological responses of bilinguals across English and Spanish contexts. To dissociate alterations in pain processing from activity associated with online language processing, he will also compare pain-responsive neural activity across languages to activity changes across language contexts during an explicitly linguistic task (i.e., semantic judgment). We are looking forward to helping Morgan conduct fMRI scans for this study and see the results.

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