Carien van Reekum

UPDATE:

I moved back to Europe in Nov 2007 and am currently at the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, UK. I will no longer update this page, so please visit my webpage now maintained in Reading, and our new lab website.

 

 

thanks for your visit here,

Carien

 

 

 

 

 

 

My path here:

Since my undergraduate days I have been interested in identifying the mechanisms underlying emotion elicitation and regulation. After I obtained my undergraduate degree in Psychology (psychonomics) from the University of Amsterdam, I moved to Geneva where I became part of the Geneva Emotion Research Group. For my Ph.D. project, I studied whether discrepant evaluation outcomes (“appraisals”) stemming from two processing modes – an implicit and explicit mode - affect the emotion response systems, including changes in ANS, facial expression and behavioral outcomes. In the final years of my PhD project, I realized that a better understanding of the central nervous system was key to the study of emotion elicitation and regulation. Enter the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience.

 

Current research:

I am currently a scientist in the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience and the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior. My research includes probing the neural circuitry underlying voluntary emotion regulation (with Heather Urry and Tom Johnstone), individual differences in emotion reactivity and recovery, and priming of emotional responses. New data collection efforts are underway within Midlife in the US (MIDUSII), a project on which I am a co-investigator (see Project 5 description). To study emotion elicitation and regulation, I am using fMRI, EEG/ERP and psychophysiological measures including startle, facial EMG, skin conductance, heart rate. I have recently also become interested in gaze fixations to better understand the patterns of brain activation we find in our fMRI studies.

 

Publications

Johnstone, T., van Reekum, C. M., Urry, H. L., Kalin, N. H., & Davidson, R. J. (in press). Failure to regulate: Compromised recruitment of prefrontal-subcortical circuitry during regulation of negative emotion in major depression. Journal of Neuroscience.

Johnstone, T., van Reekum, C. M., Baenziger, T., Hird, K., Kirsner, K., Scherer, K. R. (in press). The effects of difficulty and gain versus loss on vocal physiology and acoustics. Psychophysiology.

van Reekum, C. M., Johnstone, T., Urry, H. L., Thurow, M. T., Schaefer, H. S., Alexander, A. L., & Davidson, R. J. (2007). Gaze fixations predict brain activation during the voluntary regulation of picture-induced negative affect. Neuroimage, 36, 1041-1055 .

van Reekum, C. M., Urry, H. L., Johnstone, T., Thurow, M. E., Frye, C. J., Jackson, C. A., Schaefer, H. S., Alexander, A. L., & Davidson, R. J. (2007). Individual differences in amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex activity are associated with evaluation speed and psychological well-being. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 237-248.

Johnstone, T., van Reekum, C. M., Oakes, T. R., & Davidson, R. J. (2006). The voice of emotion:_ An FMRI study of neural responses to angry and happy vocal expressions. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 1, 242-249.

Urry, H. L., van Reekum, C. M., Johnstone, T., Kalin, N. H., Thurow, M. E., Schaefer, H. S., Jackson, C. A., Frye, C. J., Greischar, L. L., Alexander, A. L. & Davidson, R. J. (2006). Amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex are inversely coupled during regulation of negative affect and predict the diurnal pattern of cortisol secretion among older adults. Journal of Neuroscience, 26, 4415-4425. Supplemental Material.

Davidson, R. J. & van Reekum, C. M. (2005). Emotion is not one thing. Psychological Inquiry, 16, 16-18.

Johnstone, T., van Reekum, C. M., Hird, K., Kirsner, K., & Scherer, K. R. (2005). Affective speech elicited with a computer game. Emotion, 5, 513-518.

Greischar, L. L., Burghy, C. A., van Reekum, C. M., Jackson, D. C., Pizzagalli, D. A., Mueller, C., & Davidson, R. J. (2004). Effects of electrode density and electrolyte spreading in dense array electroencephalographic recording. Clinical Neurophysiology, 115, 710-720.

van Reekum, C. M., Johnstone, T., Banse, R., Etter, A., Wehrle, T., & Scherer, K. R. (2004). Psychophysiological responses to appraisal dimensions in a computer game. Cognition and Emotion, 18, 663-688.

Johnstone, T., van Reekum, C. M., & Scherer, K. R. (2001). Vocal correlates of appraisal processes. In K. R. Scherer, A. Schorr, & T. Johnstone (Eds.), Appraisal processes in emotion: Theory, Methods, Research. (pp. 271-284). New York: Oxford University Press.

van Reekum, C. M., van den Berg, H., & Frijda, N. H. (1999). Cross-modal preference acquisition: Evaluative conditioning of pictures by affective olfactory and auditory cues. Cognition and Emotion, 13, 831-836.

van Reekum, C. M. & Scherer, K. R. (1997). Levels of processing for emotion-antecedent appraisal. In G. Matthews (Ed.), Cognitive Science Perspectives on Personality and Emotion. (pp. 259-300). Amsterdam: Elsevier Science.

 

Misc writings:

Ph.D. thesis

van Reekum, C. M. (2000). Levels of processing in appraisal: Evidence from computer game generated emotions. Doctoral dissertation, University of Geneva, Switzerland.

Published proceeding papers

van Reekum, C. M. & Scherer, K. R. (2004). Testing multilevel processing of appraisal: Evidence from computer game generated emotions. In A. Kappas (Ed.), Proceedings of the XIth conference of the International Society for Research on Emotions (pp. 176-179). Amsterdam: ISRE Publications.

van Reekum, C. M. & Scherer, K. R. (1998). Levels of processing in appraisal: Evidence from computer-game generated emotions. In A. Fischer (Ed.), Proceedings of the Xth conference of the International Society for Research on Emotions. (pp. 180-186). Amsterdam: ISRE Publications.