Emotion and the temporal scaffolding of the mind

Experience unfolds continuously, yet our memories and thoughts are often experienced as discrete episodes within a larger web of associations. My research explores how emotional dynamics impact the temporal and semantic structures of these mental representations. I apply this work to clinical studies in order to test if certain emotional disruptions of memory structure give rise to seemingly intrusive and disorganized memories, common features of both PTSD and psychosis.

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.

Current Projects

• Emotion Dynamics — ongoing investigation into how naturalistic, continuous measurements of felt emotion during music listening can predict memory structure and trauma symptoms.
• Narrative Networks — modeling how segmentation of episodic memory relates to the network properties and comprehension of narratives.
• Psychopharmacology and Psychosis — clinical research on how pharmacological interventions influence semantic and affective social coordination 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 Cognition 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