We are located in the Department of Psychology at Northeastern University, with secondary sites in the Department of Psychiatry and the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MA USA.
The IASLab is directed by Professors Karen Quigley, Jordan Theriault, and Lisa Feldman Barrett and consists of research scientists, postdoctoral research fellows, graduate students, undergraduate students, and postbaccalaureate research staff. We collaborate with scientists and scholars around the globe, united by a passion to understand how a human mind arises from the continual conversation between a brain, its body, and the surrounding world (populated with other brains-in-bodies). The IASLab is transdisciplinary — we integrate evidence, concepts and methods from a range of scientific disciplines beyond psychology, including biochemistry, physiology, evolutionary and developmental neurobiology, ethology, neuroanatomy and neuroscience, anthropology, and linguistics, with additional conceptual tools from philosophy, history, and engineering. The resulting hypotheses transcend the boundaries of any single discipline.
The IASLab is best known for our research on emotion, stress, and affect, but we are broadly interested in how your brain understands what is going on in your body in relation to what is happening around you in the world, filtered through your past experience. This describes psychological phenomena like emotion, stress, and affect, but also perception, attention, memory, decision-making, action, categorization, and other topics that are conventionally studied separately. We’ve begun to consider how metabolism plays a role in these phenomena. To explore these topics, we use a combination of functional neuroimaging and a variety of methods used within the lab and in the world, including physiological measurements, behavioral tests, and ratings of experience. Collectively, we call this the biopsychosocial construction of the mind, or simply the constructed mind approach. See the research areas on our home page to see some of our research projects that use this approach.
Coming soon!
The validity and trustworthiness of scientific knowledge is maximized when it emerges from a diverse and self-critical scientific community of experts (Harding, 2015; Longino, 1990; Oreskes, 2019) A diverse scientific community brings more perspectives to bear and facilitates discovery. A diverse scientific community is also more likely be self-correcting when scientists with diverse views challenge each other during the collective give-and-take of critical examination. The IASLab is a diverse, self-critical scientific community of experts from a variety of scholarly fields. For many years, full time members of the lab have been 65–70% female and have been diverse ethnically/racially, economically, and in sexual orientation and gender identity. Across the history of the lab, 14% of full time IASLab members have been from racial or ethnic groups that have been historically underrepresented/excluded in STEM; 17% belonged to low socioeconomic status backgrounds; 9% were first-generation college students; and 19% indicated other aspects of identity that are historically underrepresented/excluded in STEM. More than half of our peer-reviewed published papers include at least one mentee author from a group that is underrepresented in STEM.