Ralph Adolphs
Ralph Adolphs studies the neural and psychological basis for human social behavior. His work has focused on examining how people recognize, perceive, and process emotions and other social cues in facial expressions. Some of the questions his lab is trying to answer are: How do people make social and moral judgments? How do they make emotionally charged decisions? Why do people with autism have difficulties with social behavior? The goal is to better understand how both healthy and atypical brains work.
Adolphs uses various techniques in his lab, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, eye tracking, and recording electrical activity in the brain. He studies neurological patients with focal brain damage, those with neuropsychiatric diseases such as autism and Williams syndrome, and neurosurgical patients who have electrodes in their brains. From these experiments, he's investigating how data from individual brain cells can be connected to neuroimaging data and, ultimately, to behavior.
Publications
- Lin, Chujun;Keles, Umit et al. (2025) How trait impressions of faces shape subsequent mental state inferencesNature Human Behaviour
- Cao, Runnan;Dubois, Julien et al. (2024) Domain-specific representation of social inference by neurons in the human amygdala and hippocampusScience Advances
- Han, Yanting;Adolphs, Ralph (2024) A shared structure for emotion experiences from narratives, videos and everyday lifeiScience
- Kim, Na Yeon;He, Junfeng et al. (2024) Smartphone‐based gaze estimation for in‐home autism researchAutism Research
- Keles, Umit;Dubois, Julien et al. (2024) Multimodal single-neuron, intracranial EEG, and fMRI brain responses during movie watching in human patientsScientific Data
- Tusche, Anita;Spunt, Robert P. et al. (2023) Neural signatures of social inferences predict the number of real-life social contacts and autism severityNature Communications
- Rouhani, Nina;Stanley, Damian et al. (2023) Collective events and individual affect shape autobiographical memoryProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
- Rusch, Tessa;Han, Yanting et al. (2023) COVID-Dynamic: a large-scale longitudinal study of socioemotional and behavioral change across the pandemicScientific Data
- Lin, Chujun;Adolphs, Ralph (2023) Trait impressions from faces depend on the goals of the perceiverBritish Journal of Psychology
- Saltoun, Karin;Adolphs, Ralph et al. (2022) Dissociable brain structural asymmetry patterns reveal unique phenome-wide profilesNature Human Behaviour