The Center for Investigating Healthy Minds

Brandi Cage, PhD

Postdoctoral Research Associate

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Brandi's research interests include examining individual differences, cultural dynamics, physiological processes, and emotions as a whole. She is particularly interested in how personality traits and intragroup cultural variables influence the process of automatic emotion regulation.

Lisa Flook, PhD

Assistant Scientist

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Lisa’s research interests are exploring prevention and early intervention strategies to promote well-being early in life. Given the negative short and long-term effects that stress has on mental and physical health, Lisa believes that mindful awareness has much to offer in helping children and adolescents improve daily well-being and cope with stress. Lisa is also involved in studying the impact of introducing mindfulness practices in educational settings.

Hyejeen Lee, PhD

Postdoctoral Research Associate

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Hyejeen's research investigates individual differences in the ability to voluntarily down-regulate negative affect and how these differences are indicated by the brain and psychophysiological measures. She also has a clinical interest in developing empirically-validated treatment protocols for effective emotion regulation.

Antoine Lutz, PhD

Associate Scientist

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More about Antoine

Antoine’s research interests are in understanding the neural counterparts to subjective experience and, more generally, the mechanisms underlying mind-brain-body interactions. More specifically, he is studying the role of large-scale neuronal integration (neural synchrony mechanisms) during various mental states (voluntary attention, emotion generation).

Donal MacCoon, PhD

Assistant Scientist

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Donal’s primary research area is sustainable well-being. He also studies the role of attention in self-regulation. He has developed a model, Context Appropriate Balanced Attention, to describe this role and has applied and tested the model with anxiety, depression, borderline personality disorder, and most recently, to mindfulness practices.

Melissa Rosenkranz, PhD

Postdoctoral Research Associate

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Melissa is interested in the neural-immune and biochemical mechanisms by which individual differences in affective responding modulate resilience to and progression of disease. She is also interested in the impact of meditation practice on affective responding and, subsequently, on the neural-immune and biochemical mechanisms underlying resilience or vulnerability to disease.

Emma Seppala, PhD

Postdoctoral Research Associate

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Emma’s primary research interests center around methodologies to increase well-being and resiliency. She is currently studying how yoga-based practices can help promote long-term mental and emotional well-being in different populations including returning combat veterans with trauma and PTSD.

Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, MA, PhD

Research Scientist

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Throughout her career Carolyn has studied the origins and development of empathy and caring behaviors beginning in the first years of life. These longitudinal studies have focused on the role of genes, temperament, family life and socialization experiences that foster or impede compassion and altruism in children. She has also conducted longitudinal studies on (a) the role of emotion in the development of psychopathology in adolescents and (b) risk and protective factors in the development of conduct problems. She has written about the intergenerational transmission of depression from mothers to daughters from a personal perspective. She served on the Task Force on women and depression for the Lt. Governor of Wisconsin and works to de-stigmatize mental illness. She is currently interested in translational questions, i.e. how scientific advances can inform the development of practices and interventions that foster kindness, altruism, and positive emotions in children.