René Weber (CV) received his Ph.D. (Dr.rer.nat.) in Psychology from the University of Technology in Berlin, Germany, and his M.D. (Dr.rer.medic.) in Psychiatry and Cognitive Neuroscience from the RWTH University in Aachen, Germany. He is a Professor in the Department of Communication in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California in Santa Barbara, and director of UCSB’s Media Neuroscience Lab. His lab investigates complex cognitive responses to mass communication and mediated narratives with an emphasis on the neural mechanisms of moral conflict, persuasion, media violence, cognitive control, and flow experiences. Current projects focus on the relationships between media-multitasking and attention disorders (ADHD), compulsive media use, and on the analysis of moral narratives and moral conflict in global news and entertainment. He was the first communication scholar to regularly use fMRI to investigate various media effects, from the impact of violence in video games to the effectiveness of anti-drug PSAs. He has published four books and more than 160 journal articles and book chapters (October, 2022). His research has been supported by grants from national scientific foundations in the United States and Germany, as well as through private philanthropies and industry contracts. He is a Fellow of the International Communication Association.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8247-7341

Musa is a graduate student in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a researcher in the Media Neuroscience Lab. He is passionate about the development of algorithmic tools that facilitate research in computational communication science. He is also interested in leveraging advancements in natural language processing and computer vision to study phenomena such as prejudice, xenophobia, and conflict on social media. Musa holds a BS in Neuroscience from New York University, Shanghai. LinkedIn

Kylie is a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her fascination with digital technologies, family dynamics, and neural reward processing brought her to the Media Neuroscience Lab. Kylie is a strong proponent for open science and exploring novel technologies to aid in the research process.

Brittany is a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a researcher in the Media Neuroscience Lab. Her research interests center around the intersection of online harassment and morality, and how the neuroscience of moral decision-making might shed light on online aggressive behavior. She received her B.A. in Psychology from California State University of Fullerton. She completed her M.S. in Psychology from Arizona State University in 2022.

Alison is a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a researcher in the Media Neuroscience Lab. Her research interests center around media effects and self-perception, and how virtual environments impact evolutionary drives and brain plasticity over time. Alison received her B.A. in Behavioral Neuroscience from the University of San Diego and her M.S. in Health and Strategic Communication from Chapman University.

Kennedy is a third year Communications and History of Architecture and the Environment double major at University of California, Santa Barbara. As an undergrad researcher she has made significant contributions to various projects including building a visual classifier of morality, analyzing female representation in news coverage, and advancing a robust hate speech classifier. Kennedy’s academic journey reflects her profound commitment to exploring interdisciplinary ventures, with a keen focus on leveraging her expertise in sustainability and marketing for future endeavors.

  Kennedy Prutow

Jenna is currently a fourth-year undergraduate student pursuing a degree in Biopsychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests include the neurobiological processes underlying excessive social media use and internet related behavioral addictions. Jenna plans to pursue a career in the medical field and is passionate about addressing mental health as a critical aspect of wellness.

Jenna

Melody is an undergraduate student studying Communication and Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a research assistant in the Media Neuroscience Lab. She is very passionate about environmental communication and is a communication and outreach intern for NASA’s Ecological Conservation Program. She is interested in applying a social justice lens to understand how environmental issues, such as climate change, are communicated.

Melody Pederson

Lauryn is an undergraduate research assistant with a dual focus on Communication and Black Studies at UCSB. Driven by a passion for understanding the underlying mechanisms of interpersonal relations, she seeks to explore the psychological foundations of human behavior beyond her majors’ confines. With a keen interest in qualitative research methodologies, she has contributed significantly to multiple projects dissecting online behavior and familial dynamics. Lauryn’s dedication to unraveling the complexities of human interaction promises to enrich and diversify further research endeavors.

Lauryn Smith

Joe is an undergraduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His curiosity regarding the complexities of the nervous system and how it drives behavior compelled him to major in Psychological and Brain Sciences. Joe’s current work in the Media Neuroscience Lab includes researching how certain personality traits affect political dispositions.

Joseph Belinfante

Kristina Kyrvik , Kristina’s Canva

Caren Chua

Mikah Nelson

Veronica Bodenstein

Frederic is an assistant professor at the Amsterdam School of Communication Research at the University of Amsterdam and a former member of the Media Neuroscience Lab. His research integrates natural language processing and computational modeling with traditional social scientific and neuroscientific methodologies to examine how moral information permeates human narratives and motivates actions.

Emily Falk is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication and director of the Communication Neuroscience Lab. Emily’s research integrates methods from cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and communication studies to understand media effects at the individual, group and population levels. Emily is also interested in the spread of messages through social networks, and how social norms, values, and culture spread. A primary focus of her work is health behavior change and the construction of effective health campaigns. Read more about Emily’s methodological approach as well as her educational and funding history. The Media Neuroscience Lab collaborates with Emily and the Communication Neuroscience Lab in the area of Persuasion Neuroscience.

Dr. Jacob T. Fisher is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of California Santa Barbara, where he conducted research in the Media Neuroscience Lab. His research explores digital technology’s impact on attention and decision-making using neuroimaging, behavioral measures, and computational modeling. He also contributes to media psychology and has developed publicly available research tools.

Dr. Richard Huskey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and the Cognitive Science Program at UC Davis. He is also a former member and manager of the Media Neuroscience Lab.  He leads the Cognitive Communication Science Lab and is affiliated with several research centers, including the Center for Mind and Brain. His research focuses on how motivation influences attitudes and behaviors, utilizing techniques like fMRI and computational methods. Dr. Huskey also serves as the Chair of the International Communication Association’s Communication Science and Biology interest group and is an Associate Editor at the Journal of Communication.

Ben is an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University. His primary research interest lies in developing and applying various fMRI analysis methods, as well as exploring novel applications of fMRI as a research tool in new fields. As a Media Neuroscience Lab collaborator, Ben works on understanding the neural systems of counter arguing. Importantly, this work includes development of new statistical procedures for analyzing brain imaging datasets that are collected in multi-modal, low controlled experimental settings.

Klaus Mathiak is Professor at the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, and Psychosomatics at RWTH University in Aachen, Germany. As psychiatrist and cognitive neuroscientist he is interested in studying neural processes underlying complex social perception and behavior via state-of-the-art brain imaging technology (fMRI, MEG). Klaus and Rene pioneered the field of media neuroscience with their studies in the area of brain imaging of virtual violence. Klaus is an expert in developing brain imaging paradigms in multi-modal, low-controlled, and mediated environments.

Stacy L. Smith is the Founder of the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, the leading global think tank studying inequality in entertainment. Dr. Smith’s groundbreaking research examines inclusion (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity, the LGBT community, people with disabilities, mental health) across film, TV and digital platforms, the music industry, and film criticism. She has authored over 100 articles, book chapters, and reports, and is covered regularly in popular press outlets. Dr. Smith crafts compelling and innovative solutions to inequality. In partnership with TIME’S UP, Tessa Thompson, and others, she launched the #4percentchallenge. She served on the Recording Academy Task Force on Diversity and Inclusion and is a Founding Board Member of She Is The Music. Dr. Smith has received numerous honors; LA Weekly named her the most influential person in Los Angeles (2015), she appeared on Billboard’s Women in Music List (2018), and was one of The Hollywood Reporter’s 50 Agents of Change (2019).

Dr. Sungbin Youk is an Assistant Professor in Communication and Media Studies at Ewha Woman’s University and a former lab member and manager of the Media Neuroscience Lab. His research focuses on behavioral neuroscience communication, exploring cognitive processes like persuasion and moral judgment using fMRI and eye-tracking. He also studies the healthy consumption of entertainment content. He has received awards for excellence in teaching at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and for his research at international conferences, including those held by the International Communication Association. CV | LinkedIn

Dr. Allison Eden is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University. She focuses on media enjoyment and its impact on attention, selection, and user behavior, with research published in top journals like Journal of Communication and Media Psychology. She is the Director of Doctoral Studies in Communication and teaches courses on human communication, media entertainment, and mass communication theory. Dr. Eden is also an associate editor of the Psychology of Popular Media.

Scott Grafton is a Professor of Psychology, previous director of the Brain Imaging Center, and Co-Director of the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies at the University of California Santa Barbara. Broadly, Scott’s work focuses on how people organize movement into goal-oriented action. The emphasis is on elucidating the cognitive architecture that underlies action representation. This is developed with studies of sequence and skill acquisition, motor simulation, sensorimotor transformation, on-line control and action observation experiments. Scott lends his expertise in these areas to help understand the relationship between media, morality, and cognitive-behavioral outcomes.

Gary Bente is a Professor in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University and the director of the Center for Avatar Research and Immersive Social Media Applications (CARISMA). His research interests cover two areas: (1) interpersonal communication including face-to-face as well as mediated interactions, and (2) emotional effects of mass media with a special emphasis on objective process measures. His current work focuses on the production and perception of nonverbal behavior across cultures and its influence on impression formation and trust. Recent work also addresses the neural mechanisms underlying nonverbal communication and person perception. His work has been published in major communication as well as cognitive science and neuroscience journals and in four authored and edited books.

Michael Gazzaniga is a Professor of Psychology and the Director of the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California Santa Barbara. Michael’s work investigating how the brain enables the mind is both foundational and inspirational to the Media Neuroscience Lab. Over the course of several decades, a major focus of Michael’s research has been an extensive study of patients that have undergone split-brain surgery and revealed lateralization of functions across the cerebral hemispheres. In addition to his numerous positions and honors, Michael is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Michael serves as the Media Neuroscience Lab’s trusted advisor and thought leader.

Dan Linz is Professor in the Department of Communication at University of California Santa Barbara. His research involves empirically testing the social psychological assumptions made by the law and legal actors in the area of the First Amendment and freedom of speech, communication in the courtroom, and the application of scientific principles to legal decision making generally: an area he defines as “Forensic Communication.” Dan’s research spans the topics of media violence, pornography, other sex-oriented entertainment, pretrial publicity, news and race, censorship and on-line privacy. Consistent with the Lab’s mission, Dan’s research agenda seeks to empirically test evolutionary/biological explanations for phenomena at the intersection of law, media, and communication.

Scott Reid is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California Santa Barbara. In accord with the lab´s core theoretical foundation and mission, Scott´s research program investigates evolutionary explanations for human communicationand considers questions at the intersection of communication, social identity, and intergrouprelations. For example, Scott´s evolutionary work has provided evidence for the hypothesis that people track accents and religious groups to avoid novel pathogens. In other work, Scott has investigated proximal mechanisms involved in social judgments of media influence and judgments of the hostility contained in mediated messages.

John Sherry is a Professor in the Department of Communication and the Cognitive Science Program at Michigan State University. He takes a cognitive science approach to questions of communication dynamics in two domains. First, he is interested in the use of media for education; in particular how to use flow to embed educational content. Additionally, he is researching the cognitive substrates of game engagement and learning; including, individual differences in cognitive skills, attentional mechanisms, and working memory capacity. Second, he has recently begun research on how to study interpersonal communication dynamically, as a system of interactions. As such, he is interested in investigating communication synchronization phenomena.

Ron Tamborini is a Professor in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University. His recent work explores the exposure to educational and entertaining content in traditional and new media. His entertainment research spans the psychology of comedy, suspenseful and violent drama, horror, tragedy, erotica, and sports. His new media research focuses on the experience of virtual and augmented reality. Ron’s work on narratives and morality is of particular relevance to the Media Neuroscience Lab. Using his model of intuitive morality and exemplars (MIME), Ron’s research program examines simple and complex processes thought to shape the reciprocal influences that connect media narratives and morality.

Peter Vorderer is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Mannheim. Previous affiliations include the University of Music, Theater and the Media in Hannover, the Annenberg School for Communication at USC and the Free University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on users’ interest in entertainment and in new media, as well as on consequences of using them. Currently, he is particularly interested in people’s habit to be (almost) permanently online and connected with others. His research has been published in major communication journals and in 11 authored and edited books. He is also President-elect select of the International Communication Association.

Dr. Matthew Grizzard is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication at The Ohio State University. He holds a Ph.D. from Michigan State University and specializes in media psychology and mass communication. His research explores moral judgment processes in media consumption, focusing on narratives, character evaluations, and moral emotions. Dr. Grizzard serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Media Psychology and Communication Research Reports and is an officer in the National Communication Association’s Communication and Social Cognition Division.

Dr. Justin Keene is an Associate Professor and JCMI Core Course Coordinator at Texas Tech University. He earned his Ph.D. from Indiana University and his M.A. from Texas Tech. His research focuses on the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral responses to media messages, employing methodologies like psychophysiology and eye tracking. Dr. Keene has published extensively on topics such as political extremism and media effects. He is recognized for his contributions to health, political, science, and sport communication, and has received multiple awards for his research and teaching excellence.