Social & Affective Neuroscience Lab at UO

The purpose of our research is to understand why people succeed or fail in their goals. Success or failure is the outcome of “self-regulation”, or the process of guiding one’s actions toward the attainment of a goal. Self-regulation involves not only the prevention of goal-inconsistent actions (typically referred to as self-control), but also promoting goal-consistent responses. Because self-regulation requires focused effort during both brief moments and across a lifetime, our studies span time frames ranging from a few seconds to a few months. Furthermore, because the psychological events involved in self-regulation can be studied at multiple levels of analysis, we examine the interactions among neural processes, subjective experiences, and behaviors in each time frame. The central aim of our work is to understand the psychological and neural mechanisms that contribute to the outcome of everyday goals including health goals such as smoking cessation and dieting.