Kateri McRae
Assistant Professor, Affect/Social and DCN

I study the relationship between emotion and cognition, with a particular focus on how different cognitive processes can impact emotion. I am interested in what causes emotions (at sensory, perceptual, cognitive and social levels). In addition, I am interested in how attention, thought and memory both change and are changed by emotion. Specifically, I examine processes that are characterized by emotion-cognition interactions, such as emotion regulation, the cognitive generation of emotion and emotional awareness.

I use an interdisciplinary, multi-measure approach to characterize emotional responding and cognitive processing. In experimental contexts, I measure self-reported emotional experience, peripheral physiological responses, and whole-brain signals obtained from neuroimaging techniques (PET and fMRI). I supplement these experimental approaches with correlational studies using self-report measures to characterize emotion-related personality variables and executive functioning tasks to evaluate cognitive skills.

Some of my recent projects include:

1. Comparing and contrasting the success of different types of emotion regulation strategies (e.g., distraction, cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression).
2. Identifying personal and contextual variables that are associated with the use of different emotion regulation strategies (a recent, creative example is an investigation of emotion regulation at the Burning Man festival).
3. Identifying the relationship between emotion-related personality variables and performance on cognitive tasks, in adolescents as well as adults.

I direct the laboratory for the study of automaticity, affect, control & thought (the AACT lab).

I am on a leave of absence for the 2009-2010 academic year.

Representative Publications:

McRae, K. and Gross, J.J. (in press) Emotion Regulation. In I.B. Wiener and W.E. Craighead (Eds.), Corsini's Encyclopedia of Psychology (4th ed.). Hoboken, N.J: Wiley.

McRae, K., Hughes, B., Chopra, S., Gabrieli, J.J.D., Gross, J.J., Ochsner, K.N. (in press). The neural correlates of cognitive reappraisal and distraction: An fMRI study of emotion regulation. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

McRae, K. Taitano, E.K., Lane, R.D. (in press). The effects of verbal labeling on psychophysiology: Objective but not subjective labeling reduces skin conductance responses to briefly presented pictures. Cognition & Emotion.

McRae, K. Reiman, E.M., Fort, C.L. Chen, K., Lane, R.D. (2008) Association between trait emotional awareness and dorsal anterior cingulate activity during emotion is arousal-dependent. NeuroImage, 41, 648-655.

McRae, K., Ochsner, K.N., Mauss, I., Gabrieli, J.D.E., Gross, J.J. (2008). Gender differences in emotion regulation: An fMRI study of cognitive reappraisal. Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, 11, 143-162.

Goldin, P.R., McRae, K., Ramel, W., Gross, J.J. (2008). The neural bases of emotion regulation during reappraisal and suppression of negative emotion. Biological Psychiatry, 63, 577-586.

Giuliani, N., McRae, K., Gross, J.J. (2008). The up- and down- regulation of amusement: experiential, behavioral, and autonomic consequences. Emotion, 8, 714-719.

Kateri McRae
Ph.D. 2007, University of Arizona

Assistant Professor, Affect/Social
and DCN

e-mail: kateri.mcrae@du.edu

Director
The AACT Lab