Communication Neuroscience Lab
Our mission is to increase health and happiness.
The Communication Neuroscience Lab is an interdisciplinary group whose mission focuses on catalyzing communication that increases human health and happiness and reduces human suffering by gaining insight into how people coordinate, bond, and influence one another.
We view communication as key to solving society’s most pressing problems. It is at the center of human health and happiness — being connected to others has enormous benefits for mental and physical wellbeing, and both healthy and unhealthy behaviors spread through social networks. We use a unique set of tools from biological, social, and engineering sciences to motivate people to make choices that increase the spread of innovation, happiness, health, and the health of our democracy, while reducing the spread of negative outcomes. We use the brain as one powerful window to understand and predict outcomes that are challenging to predict otherwise.
Photo Credit (top image): iStock / Movus
Our Research
The brain is a window to understand attitude and behavior change at the individual, group, and population levels
Featured Projects
Social Health Impact of Network Effects (SHINE)
How brain and social networks interact, and how they might be used to reduce alcohol use among college students
Brain-based Prediction of Message Effectiveness (BB-PRIME)
Illuminating the causal relationships between message features, message sharing, and health behavior change
GeoScan Smoking Study
How neural responses to point-of- sale tobacco cues change as people are exposed to those cues over time
Video
Get to know members of our lab and their work.
A video profile of Emily Falk, Ph.D., and her research.
Graduate student Prateekshit Pandey talks about how the brain reacts to humor.
Dr. Falk explains research showing how fMRI from small groups of people can predict large-scale behavior.
Lab alum Christin Scholz describes her work during her time as a graduate student.
What Makes News Get Shared Widely? The Answer Is in Your Head.
A new study from the Communication Neuroscience Lab suggests that targeting self-and-social areas of the brain encourages information sharing online.
