Lab Members

Stanford Psychophysiology Lab 2024
Director
James J. Gross is the Ernest R. Hilgard Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, where he directs 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 Honorary Doctorates from UC Louvain in Belgium and Tilburg University in the Netherlands. James has over 600 publications, which have been cited more than 200,000 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 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 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
Dena Sadeghi Bahmani, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University. She is further a clinical psychologist and obtained her doctoral degree and clinical training from the University of Basel and the Psychiatric Clinics of the University of Basel in Switzerland. Dena further completed an internship in clinical neuropsychology at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich-Germany.
At the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory and Stanford Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, Dena's research focuses on two key areas: (a) understanding emotional and physical well-being, and their underlying determinants in individuals living with neurodegenerative conditions (e.g., multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's disease); and (b) developing a novel technology-based intervention for enhancing well-being of individuals with chronic neurological disorders. She authored 90+ peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and her line of research is acknowledged by national and international scientific committees and publishers such as American Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ACTRIMS), European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ECTRIMS), Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), Swiss Society of Biological Psychiatry (SSBP), and Karger Publishers.
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.
Pilleriin Sikka is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. Pilleriin strives to bridge the fields of emotion research, sleep and dream research, consciousness research, and well-being research to understand (1) the dynamics of emotional experiences across the wake-sleep cycle; (2) whether the emotions we experience during sleep and dreaming are involved in waking emotion regulation; (3) how peace of mind is linked to emotion regulation and well-being, and how it can be cultivated, (4) how (the emotional content of) transformative experiences—psychedelic experiences, anesthesia dreams—can enhance well-being.
Graduate Students
Ashish Mehta is a PhD student at Stanford University working in the lab of James Gross. Ashish’s most recent work is focused on the following problem: For any negative situation, people can change their perspective to help them feel better, i.e., reappraise, in countless different ways. What dimensions of these potential reappraisals might we use to predict consequences such as emotion reduction and situation-focused action? How might we know which reappraisal would be most effective for a specific person? Ashish has also done work examining how the clarity with which people understand their emotions and the strategies they use to regulate their emotions interact. In his work, Ashish uses mixed-methods including natural language processing, experience sampling, and experimental design.
Kate is a fourth-year graduate student in the Psychology Department, focusing on computational affective science. She is interested in how people use their emotions as sources of information during decision-making. In her current work, Kate uses a combination of computational modeling, qualitative approaches, and behavioral experiments to understand how people learn from regret. Her other interests include applying intensive longitudinal methods to study emotion and interpersonal emotion regulation in everyday life. When not in the lab, Kate enjoys drawing, playing board games, wine-tasting, 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.
Friends and Visitors
- Amanda Morrison
- Anat Talmon
- Andero Uusberg
- Atina Manvelian
- Dana Vertsberger
- Daniela Schumacher
- David Preece
- Eran Magen
- Gesine Jordan
- Guarav Suri
- Helen Uusberg
- Hooria Jazaieri
- Jean Roisse R. Ferreira
- Johan Bjureberg
- Johannes Heekerens
- Jonas Petter
- Juan Ramos-Cejudo
- Kathrin Gerpheide
- Marily Oppezzo
- Maxi Stiller
- Pardis Miri
- Petr Slovak
- Robin Wollast
- Sylvia Kreibig
- Théo Besson
- Yael Enav
- Yang Liu