Faculty

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Moser Jason Moser
Assistant Professor
Ph.D. University of Delaware 2009
Masters University of Delaware 2006
Bachelors Pennsylvania State University 2001
Primary Program: Clinical
110B Psychology
(517) 355-2159
jmoser@msu.edu


Research Statement
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The aim of my research program is to utilize psychophysiological measures of affective and cognitive processes to illuminate biological correlates of psychopathology. A basic tenet of my research philosophy is that laboratory-based experiments in unaffected and affected individuals can significantly inform clinically relevant issues. Ultimately, I am interested in using such biological correlates to identify individuals at risk, aid in diagnosis, and index treatment response. My expertise is in anxiety and related problems like depression, but I am also interested more broadly in mental health problems. To this end, I am actively engaged in three interdependent research areas:

[1: Action monitoring and attention allocation]: One focus of my ongoing research involves understanding the underpinnings of how individuals with different forms of psychopathology monitor and adjust to mistakes and allocate attention to task-relevant stimuli. Generally, it is thought that anxious individuals have difficulty paying attention to task-relevant stimuli because of worrisome thoughts and as a result overreact to errors. Individuals with depression also show a similar pattern of abnormalities. These abnormalities can be captured by event-related brain potentials (ERPs), in particular the attention-related P300 and error-related negativity (ERN).

[2: Emotion processing]: A second focus of my research involves examining biases in the way that anxious and depressed individuals processes emotional stimuli such as faces and scenes. Generally, anxious individuals quickly attend to threatening stimuli and interpret ambiguous things as negative. Depressed individuals tend to get hung up on negative information as well as interpret ambiguous information as negative. Again, I use ERPs to examine the similarities and differences between anxious and depressed individuals in terms of how they pay attention to and interpret emotional information.

[3: Emotion regulation]: A third focus of my research combines aspects from my other two interests in that I examine how ERPs can show us how individuals use attention and cognitive control to manage their emotions. Much of my work in this area has been done with unaffected – ‘normal’ – individuals so as to better understand the biological underpinnings of emotion regulation. Ultimately, I plan to use information from these studies to inform how we think about the way in which individuals with anxiety and depression regulate their emotions.


Related Research Websites
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Clinical Psychophysiology Lab Our mission is to utilize experimental, psychophysiological methods to understand emotion and cognition in healthy individuals and to uncover emotional and cognitive abnormalities in anxious and depressed individuals.


Research Publications    
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2010Moser, J. S., Most, S. B., & Simons, R. F. (2010). Increasing negative emotions by reappraisal enhances subsequent cognitive control: A combined behavioral and electrophysiological study. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 10, 195-207.
2010Moser, J. S., Cahill, S. P., & Foa, E. B. (2010). Evidence for poorer outcome in patients with negative trauma-related cognitions receiving prolonged exposure plus cognitive restructuring: Implications for treatment matching in posttraumatic stress disorder. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 198, 72-75.
2009Moser, J. S., & Simons, R. F. (2009). The neural consequences of flip flopping: The feedback related negativity and salience of reward prediction. Psychophysiology, 46, 313 – 320.
2009Moser, J. S., Krompinger, J. W., Dietz, J., & Simons, R. F. (2009). Electrophysiological correlates of decreasing and increasing emotional responses to unpleasant pictures. Psychophysiology, 46, 17 - 27.
2008Moser, J. S., Hajcak, G., Huppert , J. D., Simons, R. F., & Foa, E. B. (2008). Interpretation bias in social anxiety as detected by event related brain potentials. Emotion, 8, 693-700.
2008Krompinger, J. W., Moser, J. S., & Simons, R. F. (2008). Modulations of the electrophysiological response to pleasant stimuli by cognitive reappraisal. Emotion, 8, 132-137.
2008Moser, J. S., Huppert, J. D., Duval, E., & Simons, R. F. (2008). Face processing biases in social anxiety: An electrophysiological study. Biological Psychology, 78, 93-103.