Lab Members

Director

James J. Gross is the Ernest R. Hilgard Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, where he directs the Stanford Center for Affective Science and the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory. James’s research focuses on emotion regulation, and he has received a number of teaching and mentoring awards, including the Stanford Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching, the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching (Stanford’s highest award for teaching), the Stanford Postdoctoral Mentoring Award (twice), the Society for Affective Science Inaugural Mentorship Award, and the APS Mentor Award from the Association for Psychological Science. James also has received research awards from the American Psychological Association, the Society for Psychophysiological Research, and the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society, as well as the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology, and Honorary Doctorates from UC Louvain in Belgium, Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and the Education University of Hong Kong in China. James has more than 650 publications, which have been cited more than 250,000 times. James is co-founding President for the Society for Affective Science, Founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of Affective Science, and a Fellow in the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Staff

Bee David

Bee provides all administrative support as Faculty Administrator to Profs Gross, Walton, Dweck, Gweon and Zaki. This also includes students and research groups in the areas of travel and human subject reimbursements, payments of invoices, verification of PCard and Travel card transactions. She also handles domestic and foreign travel arrangements and in-charge of ordering supplies in the area. She processes Visiting Student Researcher and Visiting Scholar paper works. She is also in-charge of processing visa for foreign visitors and scholars. She is also in-charge of volunteers who wants to get involved in the various research in Psychology.

Bee has been with Stanford for many, many years (she stopped counting), from Department of Urology to Medicine and Pediatrics in the School of Medicine. Bee is such a people person and loves to help in any way she can. She also has a great sense of humor which helps alleviate the staff with their busy workload and research duties. When she is off from work, she loves to watch various concerts around the Bay Area. She loves watching football (go Niners) and basketball (Warriors). She loves dogs and will stop, pet or sometimes talk to dogs that walk around campus.

Ariana Reichler

Ariana is the lab manager for the SPL. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, where she majored in Cognitive Science with a certificate in Education Studies. She is interested in studying the effects of early-life experiences and stress on emotional development, corticolimbic circuitry maturation, and later mental health outcomes. Previously, she researched the relationship between exposure to unpredictable stress and emotional memory processes. Ariana hopes to pursue clinical work in the future. Outside of the lab, she enjoys being outdoors (hiking, camping, road trips), listening to good podcasts, and visiting art museums.

Postdoctoral Fellows

Matt Dixon

Matt is a research scientist in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of British Columbia. His research uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), behavioral tasks, ecological momentary assessment (EMA), and theoretical models to examine topics including: (1) the neural basis of value-based influences on cognitive control; (2) the contribution of large-scale brain networks (e.g., default mode network) to self-referential processing and clinical disorders; and (3) the nature of core beliefs about the self and world and how they affect emotions and emotion regulation strategy use.

Graduate Students

Kate Petrova

Kate is a fifth-year graduate student in the Psychology Department, focusing on computational affective science. In her work, she uses the methods of computational cognitive science to construct formal models of emotions and their roles in decision-making and social interactions. In her dissertation, Kate uses a combination of computational modeling, qualitative approaches, eye-tracking, and behavioral experiments to understand how people learn from regret. When not in the lab, Kate enjoys drawing, playing DnD, and working towards her private pilot license. Kate earned her A.B. in Psychology from Bryn Mawr College and spent several years working on the Harvard Study of Adult Development before joining SPL.

Miłka Waniak

Miłka Waniak is a first-year PhD at the SPL. She earned her B.S. from UC San Diego, where she double majored in Psychology and Cognitive Behavioral Neuroscience, and upon graduation worked full-time at Princeton University. Miłka is primarily interested in how different facets of emotional awareness shape emotion regulation. Her previous research has examined rejection reappraisal, affective abstraction and empathy, using combination of psychophysiological, neural and behavioral methods. In her free time, she enjoys staying active through sports like squash and practicing yoga, as well as doing art, such as painting.