Emotion and the temporal scaffolding of the mind

Experience unfolds continuously, but meaning depends on how it is structured. Memory and thought are organized into discrete episodes within a broader web of associations, and my research examines how emotional dynamics shape the temporal and semantic form of these representations.

I am interested in how the structure of emotional memory supports language, social coordination, and shared understanding, and in what happens when that structure becomes fragmented, rigid, or unstable. Working in clinical populations, especially trauma and psychosis, I study how disruptions in memory organization give rise to difficulties in communication, social connection, and the maintenance of shared reality.

Current Appointment

I am currently a T32 Postdoctoral Fellow at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior and the VA MIRECC (Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center). I received my PhD in Cognitive Psychology from UCLA in 2025.

Ongoing Research

• Emotion Dynamics and Memory Structure — I investigate how continuous, naturalistic fluctuations in emotional experience shape the temporal organization of memory. This work asks how disruptions in emotional dynamics produce fragmented or rigid memory structures associated with trauma and related forms of psychopathology.
• Narrative Structure and Shared Representation — I model how the segmentation and network organization of episodic memory support coherent narrative construction and shared representations of experience. This work examines how memory structure enables meaning-making, comprehension, and alignment between individuals.
• Social Coordination in Psychosis and Pharmacology — I study how disruptions in memory and affective structure impact social coordination, using language-based measures of semantic alignment and responsiveness during interaction. This work examines how pharmacological interventions modulate shared reality in psychosis.

Selected Publications

Emotion, Memory, and Structure

• Dynamic emotional states shape the episodic structure of memory. Nature Communications, 2023.
• Negative emotional events retroactively disrupt semantic scaffolding of temporal-order memory. Emotion, 2025.
• Emotional arousal lingers in time to bind discrete episodes in memory. Cognition and Emotion, 2025.
• The content and structure of dreams are coupled to affect. arXiv, 2024.

Fear Learning and Context

• Neural reinstatement reveals divided organization of fear and extinction memories in the human brain. Current Biology, 2022.
• Contextual reinstatement promotes extinction generalization in healthy adults but not PTSD. Neuropsychologia, 2020.
• Generalization of conditioned fear along a dimension of increasing positive valence. Neuropsychologia, 2020.

Social Coordination and Polarization

• Rise of QAnon: A Mental Model of Good and Evil Stews in an Echochamber. CogSci Proceedings, 2021.
• Does social rigidity predict cognitive rigidity? Profiles of socio-cognitive polarization. Psychological Research, 2023.
• Going viral: How fear, socio-cognitive polarization and problem-solving influence fake news detection and proliferation during COVID-19 pandemic. Frontiers in Communication, 2021.

Selected Press

• Interview with NPR's Science Friday
• Feature on BBC's All in the Mind
• Feature in Psychology Today