Thirty years of neuroimaging reveal the set of brain regions consistently associated with pleasant and unpleasant affect in humans—or the neural reference space for valence. Yet some of humans’ most potent affective states occur in the context of other humans.

Congratulations to Dr. Rasha Kardosh for winning the best article award from the International Social Cognition Network.

 Rasha eceived the award for the article Minority Salience and the overestimation of individuals from minority groups in perception and memory

Emotions and moods often seem to make us behave irrationally. Why, then, do we have them? In new work, Emanuel Aviv and Eran Eldar expose the rationality that may lie hidden even in the most notoriously irrational of emotional states and biases. To do this, they identify three computations that emotional states mediate: computations about where we are, about what we do, and about what our future holds. These computations are primary means by which humans and animals learn and make decisions, and each of them is mediated by a distinct familiar emotion or mood.

Shir is a doctoral student in the laboratory of Prof. Anat Perry, and she was chosen to receive an award of excellence for doctoral students from the Yad Hanadiv Foundation.

Shir investigates how different information channels (visual, auditory information, or a combination of both) contribute to processes of empathy and understanding the other. She uses various tools - behavioral experiments, measuring eye movements and electrophysiology, to understand these processes in the general population, and specifically in people with ADHD and autism.