My major areas of interest are cognitive and social neuroscience. In my lab, we use EEG and functional MRI, combined with theoretical frameworks borrowed from cognitive and evolutionary psychology, as well as psychopathology, to determine and probe the neural underpinnings of the social brain. Specifically, my focus is the neural mechanisms underlying notions such as empathy, morality, and justice, among others.

Empathy is the ability to take the perspective of others or feel affected by their distress. Even though it might be easily defined, in practice, empathy subsumes a variety of neurobiological circuits and partially dissociable social, emotional and cognitive subsystems that interact and operate in a parallel fashion. These systems include top-down processes, such as those engaged during self-regulation, motivation, intention, etc. and that encompass brain regions like the orbitofrontal cortex, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, among others; as well as bottom-up mechanisms, like those active during affective arousal, and which elicit activity in brain regions such as the amygdala and hypothalamus, that summed up modulate the extent of the empathetic experience and the likelihood of prosocial behavior, as each of these networks feed forward towards other stages of processing that enhance flexible and appropriate behavioral responses. Participants from my studies are typically developing infants, children, and adults in all stages of life, as well as individuals with social impairments, such as subjects with schizophrenia, depression, psychopathy, or autism spectrum disorder.

All in all, my lab’s goal is that of elucidating the neural mechanisms underlying the individual differences concerning behavior during social interactions and cognition of social phenomena, as to expand the current scientific knowledge in this important aspect of human experience.