Professor Robert W. Levenson

Department of Psychology

Dr. Levenson's research is in the area of human psychophysiology, which studies the interplay between psychological and physiological processes. Two of his major research projects focusing on aging are 1) neural substrates of emotion and 2) age and emotion. In examining the neural substrates of emotion, Dr. Levenson's laboratory investigates the ways that emotional reactivity, emotional regulation, emotional understanding, and socioemotional behavior are altered in the early stages of organic brain diseases (frontotemporal dementia, Alzheimer's, Huntington's). Using methods for assessing emotion developed in their previous work, Dr. Levenson's laboratory is able to detect subtle changes in the emotion system associated with the onset and course of neuropathology. His second major project focuses on the physiological changes, expressive behaviors, subjective experience, and linguistic aspects of emotion in young, middle-aged, and elderly individuals. The primary purpose of this work is to understand how the processes of emotional reactivity, emotion regulation, emotional understanding, and socioemotional behavior change as a function of normal adult development.