Carly Lasagna, B.A., Clinical Science Ph.D. Student, NSF Graduate FellowWhat can you tell me about the NSF graduate research fellowship program? The NSF GRFP recognizes outstanding graduate students in STEM pursuing research-based degrees at accredited US institutions. It is considered the oldest graduate fellowship of its kind and has historically been awarded to recipients who go on to achieve high levels of success in their future academic and professional careers. NSF Fellows are anticipated to become knowledge experts who can contribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovations in science and engineering. It is a 5-year fellowship with 3 years of financial support.
Are you able to share how much the grant is you received? The fellowship includes three years of financial support: an annual stipend of $34,000 and a $12,000 annual cost of education allowance totaling $134,000.
What sort of Prechter Program data are you using in your research? I am using Prechter cohort emotional go/no-go EEG data.
What is the title of your research? Parsing the mechanisms of affective inhibitory control with model-based neuroscience.
How does your research relate to the work that Ivy Tso, Ph.D. is doing? Dr. Tso is an expert in social and affective neuroscience, especially with regards to the mechanisms of social cognitive processes in psychopathology. Her work explores these processes using quantitative methods and EEG (among others) and my work aims to integrate these domains into a single framework that can be used to study processes like affective inhibitory control. Both Dr. Tso’s work and my research project are based on a common premise: studying the mechanisms of social cognitive processes (like affective inhibitory control) can lay the groundwork for the design of more effective interventions.
What is your working relationship with Ivy Tso, Ph.D.? Dr. Tso is my PhD advisor and research/academic mentor.
What is the goal of your research? The goal of my research is to delineate the cognitive mechanisms driving inhibitory control in affective contexts. More specifically, my research aims to 1) identify the shared processes driving both behavior (i.e., how quickly/accurately people make decisions) and brain activity during affective inhibitory control, and 2) identify how those underlying processes are modulated in affective contexts to influence our behavior. In doing so, this research will produce knowledge upon which future translational work can build to inform policy and interventions aimed at helping people lead more healthy and productive lives.
What made you decide to focus on this particular area of research? Impulsivity is a natural part of the human condition. It is normal to say something you wish you had not, or to make an occasional spur-of-the-moment decision. But for ~17% of Americans impulsivity is frequent and more extreme—constantly interrupting others, regular overspending, erratic shifts in careers—and this can have deleterious effects on relationships, achievement, finances, and health. While impulsivity happens in many circumstances, it is particularly prevalent in emotion-laden contexts. For example, we are more likely to blurt out rude remarks in an argument with an angry partner than we are in a calm conversation. This may occur because affective contexts place more demands on our cognitive control systems and/or heighten our susceptibility to reflexive behavior, making failures to suppress automatic responses more likely. Yet there is much to learn about the neural bases of affective impulsivity. Understanding these mechanisms is a step towards developing policy and interventions that could help nearly 1 in 5 Americans lead more healthy and productive lives.
Considering the importance and broad impacts of understanding the mechanisms of affective impulsivity motivated my decision to focus on this area of research. To achieve this, I focused on a key facet of impulsivity: the failure of inhibitory control, which enables us to overcome inappropriate responses.