Lab Members
WendY Berry Mendes
Lab Director
Dr. Mendes is the Sarlo/Ekman Professor of Emotion at UC San Francisco. Her research questions sit at the intersection of social, personality, and biological psychology and primarily concerns questions regarding embodiment: how emotions, thoughts, and intentions are experienced in the body and how bodily responses shape and influence thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. Some current research areas include coping with stigma and discrimination, dyadic intergroup interactions, affect contatgion, mind-body relations across the life course, influence of emotional labeling on emotional experience and effects of stress on decision-making.
Erika Siegel
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Dr. Erika H. Siegel is a post-doctoral fellow in the Center for Health and Community at UCSF. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Northeastern University. Erika's work explores the role of affect in the construction of conscious experience with a particular focus on the way context and individual variation influence both the experience of emotion and peripheral physiology. She also uses research synthesis methodologies to more carefully model peripheral reactivity during affect and emotion. In the EHPL, Erika is studying the interplay between affect and psychophysiology in social contexts, with a particular focus on the way that individual difference in interoceptive awareness can influence autonomic co-regulation and affect contagion. You can read more about her work at www.erikahsiegel.com.
Amie Gordon
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Dr. Amie M. Gordon is a post-doctoral fellow in Health Psychology. Amie received her PhD in Social-Personality Psychology from UC Berkeley. In her work, Amie draws upon social, personality, and health psychology to explore the factors that shape interpersonal relationships. She takes a multilevel approach, examining social-cognitive, affective, and biological processes that influence interpersonal behaviors and outcomes. In the EHP Lab, she is focused on elucidating the links between sleep and interpersonal functioning by using a dyadic perspective to capture how people's sleep affects their own thoughts, feelings and behaviors as well as the thoughts, feeling, and behaviors of those around them. You can read more about Amie's work at www.amiegordon.com.
Amie's CV
Michael Trujillo
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Dr. Michael Trujillo is a post-doctoral fellow in the Center for Health and Community at UCSF. He received his PhD in Health Psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University. His research is centered on understanding how stigma “gets under the skin” to impact mental and physical health. His research is guided by ecological models that view stigma as a fundamental cause of health outcomes and examines how interpersonal, intrapersonal, and structural forms of stigma, particularly those relating to sexual orientation and gender identity, impact health disparities. In the EHP Lab, he is extending this work to decision-making and the role of affectivity.
Lauren Whitehurst
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Dr. Lauren Whitehurst’s research interests broadly entail exploring processes during sleep that are important for health and cognitive function. Her research explores how autonomic and central nervous system factors interact to produce regulatory effects on sleep-dependent health and cognitive outcomes.
Forrest Rogers
Doctoral Candidate
Forrest D. Rogers, M.A., is a doctoral candidate in biological psychology at the University of California, Davis, where he is a trainee of Dr. Karen L. Bales. Forrest is a pre-doctoral trainee in the NIH-sponsored (T32) Affective Science Training Program, through which he receives additional training in human emotion, health, and psychophysiology from Dr. Wendy Berry Mendes at UCSF. He received his B.A. in French and B.S. in Biological Science with College and Departmental Honors from Oklahoma State University. Forrest studies both prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) and humans to explore how parent-child social interactions shape affective/emotional and bio-behavioral development. He is particularly interested in the relationship between hormones, affective states and behavioral processes. (e): fdrogers@ucdavis.edu
Helena Rose Karnilowicz
Doctoral Candidate
Helena Rose Karnilowicz is a doctoral student in Social/Personality Psychology at UC Berkeley under the mentorship of Dr. Iris Mauss. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of San Francisco with a BA in Psychology and a minor in Child and Youth Studies. Between undergrad and graduate school, Helena was a lab manager in the EHPL. She studies the role of beliefs about emotion and emotion regulation in healthy social relationships and psychological functioning. She is particularly interested in how parents’ beliefs and emotion regulation tendencies shape children’s socioemotional development.
Katherine Ross
Lab Manager
Katie Ross is the Lab Manager for the Emotion, Health, and Psychophysiology Lab. She graduated from Johns Hopkins University in May 2016, where she obtained a B.S. in Applied Math and Statistics and B.A. in Psychology. She hopes to pursue a Ph.D. in Health Psychology, and is particularly interested in how sleep and other physical health behaviors affect psychological and emotional processes.
Erin Nakahara
Project Director
Erin graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in psychology. She is interested in how culture influences emotion process and how this relationship impacts mental and physical health. Erin hopes to pursue a PhD in psychology in the near future.
Sierra Semko
Project Director
Sierra graduated from Miami University of Ohio in 2018, where she received a B.A. in Psychology. Her research interests relate to the embodiment of social experiences, such as racial discrimination, and the downstream effects on health and well-being. She hopes to obtain a Ph.D. in Psychology and to conduct research which helps to illuminate contributing factors to differential health outcomes for particular social groups.