An official website of the United States governmentAffective Neuroscience and Pain Lab
About
Lab Chief: Lauren Y. Atlas, Ph.D.
Lauren Y. Atlas, Ph.D., leads the Affective Neuroscience and Pain Lab in the NCCIH Intramural Research Program. The lab’s work focuses on characterizing the psychological and neural mechanisms by which expectations and other cognitive and affective factors influence pain, emotional experience, and clinical outcomes. Our approach is multimodal: We integrate experimental psychology, neuroimaging, psychophysiology, computational approaches, and other interventions to understand how psychological and contextual factors influence subjective experience. Current projects focus on dissociating components of expectancy (e.g., instructions vs. conditioning; stimulus vs. treatment expectancies), relating pain with other types of hedonic affective responses, and understanding social influences on pain (e.g., patient-provider interactions; health disparities). Long-term goals include revealing how specific features of the clinical context and interpersonal aspects influence patient outcomes, as well as determining whether expectancy-based processing is altered in specific patient populations.
Lab Chief
Dr. Atlas received her B.A. in psychology from the University of Chicago in 2003, and her Ph.D. in psychology in 2011 from Columbia University, where she studied under the mentorship of Dr. Tor D. Wager. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Elizabeth Phelps at New York University’s Department of Psychology in 2014. Dr. Atlas joined NCCIH in 2014 as a tenure-track clinical investigator and chief of the Affective Neuroscience and Pain Lab. She holds joint appointments with the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Her laboratory uses a multimodal approach to investigate how expectations and learning influence pain and emotion, and how these factors influence clinical outcomes.