Kateri McRae
Assistant Professor, Affect/Social, Cognitive 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 teach a graduate seminars in Affective Neuroscience and fMRI Methods, and undergraduate courses that explore the relationship between psychology and theater. One is called, "Exploring Psychology Through Theater" and the other, "Emotions in Theater and the Brain."

I am currently an undergraduate major adviser for Psychology and the faculty adviser for Psi Chi and the Psychology Club.

Representative Publications:

McRae, K., Ciesielski, B.R.G., Gross, J.J. (in press) Unpacking cognitive reappraisal:  Goals, tactics and Outcomes.  Emotion 

McRae. K. Heller, S.M., John, O.P & Gross, J.J. (in press). Context-dependent emotion regulation: Suppression and reappraisal at the Burning Man festival. Basic and Applied Social Psychology.

McRae, K., Misra, S., Prasad, A.K., Pereira, S.C., Gross, J.J. (in press). Bottom-Up and Top-Down Emotion Generation: Implications for Emotion Regulation. Social, Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience.

McRae, K., Ochsner, K.N. & Gross, J.J. (2010). The reason in passion: A social cognitive neuroscience approach to emotion regulation. In R.F. Baumeister & K.D. Vohs (Eds.), Handbook of self-regulation: Research, theory and applications (2nd ed.). New York, N.Y.: Guilford Press.

McRae, K., Taitano, E.K., Lane, R.D. (2010). The effects of verbal labeling on psychophysiology: Objective but not subjective labeling reduces skin conductance responses to briefly presented pictures. Cognition & Emotion, 5, 829-839.

McRae, K., Hughes, B., Chopra, S., Gabrieli, J.J.D., Gross, J.J., Ochsner, K.N. (2010). The neural correlates of cognitive reappraisal and distraction: An fMRI study of emotion regulation. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22, 248-262.

Ochsner, K.N, Ray, R.D., Hughes, B., McRae, K., Cooper, J., Weber, J., Gabrieli, J.J.D., Gross, J.J. (2009). Bottom-up and top-down processes in emotion generation: common and distinct neural mechanisms. Psychological Science, 20, 1322-1331.

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.

Kateri McRae
Ph.D. 2007, University of Arizona

Assistant Professor, Affect/Social,
Cognitive and DCN

e-mail: kateri.mcrae@du.edu

Director
The AACT Lab