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Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory

Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

We are a research group interested in studying the psychological and biological underpinning of emotion and emotion regulation in humans.

ABOUT US

The Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory (CNL) is based at the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. It started as a small research group in 2004, and rapidly became one of the leading research laboratories in Romanian cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Our research integrates psychological and biological approaches in order to understand individual differences in emotion and emotion regulation, emotion-cognition interactions, and emotional vulnerability or risk for psychopathology. We are using a wide array of methods, from genotyping and neuroendocrine assays to autonomic psychophysiology and optical neuroimaging. Most of our studies involve healthy volunteers, both adults and adolescents.

CNL has a multidisciplinary team that includes cognitive psychologists and clinical psychologists, medical doctors and biologists, as well as an expanding network of international collaborations that includes researchers from cognitive science, behavior genetics and neuroeconomics. Each year, undergraduate students are trained in emotion research as part of the CNL internship program.

OUR RESEARCH

Our research focuses on individual differences in emotion and emotion regulation, emotion-cognition interactions and emotional risk factors for psychopathology. Using multidisciplinary methods that are directly available in the lab, our studies aim to integrate psychological and biological measures in order to give a multilevel (genes-brain-emotions) perspective on human emotions. We are pursuing several lines of research related to individual differences in emotion regulation; gene-environment interactions in stress reactivity; cognitive biases to threat and anxiety; the influence of emotions on decision making; and aesthetic emotions. In this research, we strive to find ecological approaches, through lab measures that are linked to real world emotions, or field studies.