Colloquium

Alyssa Sinclair, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Pennsylvania

Title: Shaping the Affective Context of Cognition

Abstract: How can educators help anxious students learn from their mistakes? What motivates people to seek information and share it with others? How can we motivate behavior change to improve health outcomes and address climate change? Affective science reveals common mechanisms that underlie these diverse real-world challenges. In this talk, I will explore how affective states shape our memories, beliefs, and behaviors. I will present studies investigating how motivation biases memory and decision making, how the affective framing of news shapes information consumption, and how imagining the future motivates preventative health behaviors. This research program integrates insights from behavioral experiments, functional neuroimaging, computational modeling, and large-scale online field studies. Taken together, these studies reveal how emotion, motivation, risk, and reward shape brain and behavior, leveraging affective science to address timely societal challenges.