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Elizabeth Anya Phelps is the Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science and New York University. She is a cognitive neuroscientist known for her research at the intersection of memory, learning, and emotion. She was the recipient of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (SANS) Distinguished Scholar Award and the 21st Century Scientist Award from the James S. McDonnell Foundation, as well as other honors and awards in her field.

Biography

Phelps was born in Washington, DC. She attended college at Ohio Wesleyan University and earned a Bachelor's Degree in 1984, with a major in Psychology and a minor in Philosophy. Subsequently Phelps went to Princeton University where she received a M.A. in 1986 and Ph.D in 1989 in Psychology, working under the supervision of Marcia K. Johnson. After graduation she worked as a research scientist at Dartmouth Medical School, the New School of Social Research and at New York University.

Phelps joined the faculty at New York University (NYU) in 1999. Previously she had worked at Yale University as an Assistant and Associate Professor of Psychology (1992-1999).

Some positions that Phelps has served on were the Board of Directors of the Association for Psychological Science and the Society for Neuroethics. She was also the President of the Society for Neuroeconomics and has served as the editor of the journal Emotion.

Research

Phelps's research focuses on how our emotions affect the way brain systems function in relation to memory and learning. She aims to figure out how emotions make certain learning experiences stick with us. Her research centers around four topics: incorporating animal models of emotional learning to explain human behavior, influence of emotion on episodic memory, impact of emotion on perception, attention, and expression, and explaining social behavior, decision making, and economics using basic mechanisms of emotional learning.

In an interview with Ira Flatow of Science Friday with NPR News, Phelps explained her study on extinction of memory, and how she hopes it can be used to treat people with fearful memories (e.g., phobias, PTSD, anxiety disorders). Phelps paired colored squares and mild shocks to participants' wrist to create a fear memory. She then examined the extinction of the fear memory by incorporating extinction training (showing the colored square without shocks) to one group of participants when the memory was vulnerable, and observed that the group no longer showed signs of fear. The second group received the same extinction training but outside of the memory vulnerability window, and still expressed fear. Repeated extinction training helps remove the fearful memory.

In another study Phelps examined flashbulb memories using functional magnetic resonance imaging. She observed 24 participants as they recalled their 9/11 experiences. As participants recalled the attacks, the fMRI displayed their amygdala lighting up, showing that the amygdala associated with emotional memories.

Representative Publications

• Anderson, A. K., & Phelps, E. A. (2001). Lesions of the human amygdala impair enhanced perception of emotionally salient events. Nature, 411(6835), 305-309.

• Phelps, E. A. (2006). Emotion and cognition: insights from studies of the human amygdala. Annual Review of Psychology, 57, 27-53.

• Phelps, E. A., & LeDoux, J. E. (2005). Contributions of the amygdala to emotion processing: from animal models to human behavior. Neuron, 48(2), 175-187.

• Phelps, E. A., O'Connor, K. J., Cunningham, W. A., Funayama, E. S., Gatenby, J. C., Gore, J. C., & Banaji, M. R. (2000). Performance on indirect measures of race evaluation predicts amygdala activation. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12(5), 729-738.

References

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External links

• Phelps Lab