Ralph Adolphs

Bren Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience

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Research interests

Cognitive Neuroscience, Neuropsychology, Neuroscience of Emotion, Social Neuroscience.

Research Statement

My laboratory investigates the neural and psychological basis of social behavior in humans. Much of our work has focused on how we recognize emotions from people's facial expressions and from other visual cues.

We study healthy individuals, using functional magnetic resonance imaging and other techniques, and also study neurological patients with focal brain damage, psychiatric populations such as autism, and neurosurgical patients who have electrodes implanted in their brains.

The findings are providing us with a picture of how perception of other people is linked to the recognition of socially relevant cues, to the direction of attention to such cues, to their encoding into memory, and, ultimately, to the guidance of our behavior towards others. These data are important not only for a better understanding of how healthy brains function (e.g., when making economic decisions), but also how ill brains dysfunction (e.g., in autism and post-traumatic stress disorder).

Publications

R. Adolphs, D. Tranel, H. Damasio, A. Damasio (1994). "Impaired Recognition of Emotion in Facial Expressions Following Bilateral Damage to the Human Amygdala". Nature 372: 669-672.

R. Adolphs, D. Tranel, A.R. Damasio (1998). "The Human Amygdala in Social Judgment." Nature 393: 470-474.

R. Adolphs, J.A. Russell, and D. Tranel (1999). "A Role for the Human Amygdala in Recognizing Emotional Arousal from Unpleasant Stimuli." Psychological Science 10: 167-171.

R. Adolphs (1999). "Social Cognition and the Human Brain." Trends in Cognitive Sciences 3: 469-479.

R. Adolphs, H. Damasio, D.Tranel, G.Cooper and A.R. Damasio (2000). "A Role for Somatosensory Cortices in the Visual Recognition of Emotion as Revealed by 3-D Lesion Mapping." The Journal of Neuroscience 20: 2683-2690.

R. Adolphs (2001). "The Neurobiology of Social Cognition." Current Opinion in Neurobiology 11: 231-239.

H. Kawasaki, R. Adolphs, O. Kaufman, H. Damasio, A.R. Damasio, M. Granner, H. Bakken, T. Hori and M.A. Howard (2001). "Single-unit responses to emotional visual stimuli recorded in human ventral prefrontal cortex." Nature Neuroscience 4:15-16.

R. Adolphs (2002). "Recognizing Emotion From Facial Expressions: Psychological and Neurological Mechanisms." Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews 1: 21-61.

R. Adolphs, D. Tranel, H. Damasio (2002). "Neural Systems for Recognizing Emotion from Prosody." Emotion 2: 23-51.

R. Adolphs (2003). "Cognitive Neuroscience of Human Social Behavior." Nature Reviews Neuroscience 4: 165-178.

R. Adolphs (2003). "Investigating the Cognitive Neuroscience of Social Behavior." Neuropsychologia 41:119-126.

R. Adolphs, F. Gosselin, T. Buchanan, D. Tranel, P. Schyns, A. Damasio (2005). "A mechanism for impaired fear recognition after amygdala damage." Nature 433: 68-72.

R. Adolphs, T.W. Buchanan, D. Tranel (2005). "Amygdala damage impairs emotional memory gist but not details of complex stimuli." Nature Neuroscience 8:512-519.

R. Adolphs, D. Tranel, M. Koenigs, A.R. Damasio (2005). "Preferring one taste over another without recognizing either." Nature Neuroscience 8: 860-861.

Complete archive: http://www.emotion.caltech.edu