After 13 years at the University of North Carolina, the lab is moving…As of August, 2025, the lab will take up its new home in the Department of Psychology at The Ohio State University and the Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Brain Imaging!

FOR undergraduate research assistants

Due to our summer, 2025 move to OSU, we will not be taking new undergraduate research assistants at UNC for spring or summer, 2025. For lab experiences focused on similar topics, check out the Carolina Social Neuroscience and Health Lab (for work on emotion/affect in adults) or the Child Imaging Research on Cognition and Life Experiences (CIRCLE) Lab or Developmental Social Neuroscience Lab (for work on emotion/affect in children/adolescents).

FOR POSTDOcs and graduate applicants

If you are a potential postdoc interested in joining the lab at OSU, please reach out to Dr. Lindquist directly via email at kristen.lindquist [at] unc.edu.

The ‘25-26 graduate application cycle has closed. If you are a graduate applicant interested in applying to work with Dr. Lindquist in ‘26-27 see information about applying to OSU here. Note that Dr. Lindquist accepts students through both the Social Psychology Program and Cognitive Neuroscience Program in OSU’s Department of Psychology.

Please note that Dr. Lindquist does not conduct pre-application interviews via Zoom or email to ensure equity across applicants. Below are some answers to common questions about applying to the lab:

What are you working on?
The lab will be analyzing data from our on-going studies, some of which are just producing data now, for years to come! These include:

  • Emotion and Physiology in Context (EPIC): We are just finishing up EPIC, which is a multimodal study (imaging, psychophysiology, ecological momentary assessment, behavioral assessment of interoception) of emotional experiences, affective decision making and emotion regulation in adults aged 18-85. We will be analyzing data from this study for the foreseeable future.

  • Physiology and Cognition (PAC): We plan to finish the PAC study in Spring ‘25. It examines how interoception moderates the effects of an induced allostatic perturbation (i.e., hunger) on decision making.

  • SUPER Brain: Although in the middle of data collection, we are just now finishing wave 1 of SUPER Brain in collaboration with Dr. Eva Telzer’s lab. SUPER Brain is a longitudinal multimodal study (imaging, ecological momentary assessment, behavioral assessment of interoception) in children and adolescents aged 8-12. We will be analyzing data from this study for the foreseeable future.

  • Social Affective Neural Integration: This multimodal study (imaging, end of day surveys assessing social interactions and affect) was designed to examine dynamic changes in brain functional organization during social affective experiences (pleasant and unpleasant social exchanges). In collaboration with Dr. Jessica Cohen’s lab and Dr. Barbara Fredrickson’s lab, we are engaging in on-going analysis of this data set.

What are you going to work on in the future?

See our Research Themes to get a sense of the direction of the lab. Right now, the lab’s focus continues to primarily be on the role of the body in emotion (how interoception and visceral states shape emotion) as well as life-span shifts in the construction of emotion (from early childhood to late adulthood). But we are also interested in questions about language and emotion, particularly as they pertain to cultural differences and cultural evolution of emotion using large-scale language models and questions about individual differences in emotional expertise (who excels at understanding their emotions and emotional functioning and how could someone who has difficulty with their emotions become better at emotional understanding?)

What do you look for in a graduate student?

Research experience in psychology, neuroscience, or a related field is a must. Having experience with neuroimaging, physiology, or coding is definitely a plus. Although we study social behaviors, questions about emotion and affect should be central to your interests. More generally, you should be aware of and interested in theories of emotion, particularly constructionist/predictive processing approaches.

What type of students do best in the lab?

Students who are capable of being independent, but who are also team players tend to thrive in the lab.