About

Adam Anderson is a professor at Cornell University in the Department of Psychology within the College of Arts and Sciences. His research focuses on the role of emotions in all human faculties, from shaping the earliest stages of perception to influencing moral judgments. His work considers both psychological and neural levels of analysis, with a guiding principle of understanding the function of emotions as tools intended to help rather than harm us. Anderson has been recognized for his contributions with awards such as the APA Early Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions in cognitive and behavioral neuroscience and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Young Investigator Award.

Research topics

• Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Cognitive psychology
• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Developmental psychology
• Social psychology
• Biology
• Pedagogy
• Biophysics
• Materials science
• Audiology
• Communication
• Biochemistry
• Internal medicine
• Optoelectronics
• Chemistry
• Mathematics
• Nanotechnology

Selected publications

• Vagus nerve stimulation alters task‐evoked pupillary responses in older but not younger adults: A single‐blind active sham‐controlled crossover trial

  Alzheimer s & Dementia · 2026-02-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  INTRODUCTION: The locus coeruleus (LC) undergoes age-related changes and is involved in Alzheimer's disease pathogenesis. Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) may modulate LC activity and could be used therapeutically, but age-related differences in VNS responses remain unexplored. METHODS: We used a single-blind, sham-controlled, crossover design in 41 participants (21 younger, 20 older adults). Participants completed a visual oddball task with pupillometry during transcutaneous auricular VNS (verum: cymba concha; sham: earlobe) with ≈ 30 minutes of washout between conditions. RESULTS: Older adults showed smaller baseline pupil diameter but larger normalized task-evoked responses than younger adults a priori. VNS produced age-specific effects: older adults demonstrated increased tonic pupil size throughout stimulation and reduced oddball-evoked responses, with stronger effects with more current. Younger adults showed no consistent VNS effects. DISCUSSION: VNS affects LC-related physiological measures differently across age groups, with older adults showing more robust responses. These age-specific effects may reflect different baseline LC activity states.

  PublisherDOI

• Same emotion, different stimuli: A context-sensitive method to evoke nostalgia

  Behavior Research Methods · 2026-04-07

  articleOpen access

  Lived experience and current context are critical antecedents of emotions. However, practical methodologies for incorporating these factors into experimental emotion research remain scarce. We developed and tested an idiographic-nomothetic method to evoke a prototypically situated emotion: nostalgia. We describe the iterative qualitative and quantitative method, which involved (1) choosing cross-cultural target populations to manipulate present versus developmental context, (2) creating a conceptually and visually standardized food image set, (3) testing the nomothetic and idiographic factors in nostalgia, (4) measuring the outcomes' replicability, and (5) testing the relation of state to global trait nostalgia. The method was examined on US university students who share the same current environment but originate from two distinct developmental contexts (USA vs. India). Across the two cohorts, nostalgic value exhibited an idiographically nomothetic pattern: vast variances between individuals coexisted alongside a cross-cultural pattern of high nostalgia for developmentally consistent foods within a person, which was greater for the culture further displaced from home. Nostalgia for food was consistent across time; high test-retest reliability was on par with food familiarity. Global trait nostalgia contributed to the propensity and intensity of evoked state nostalgia. We discuss this method's usefulness for bridging phenomenological and positivist accounts of emotions while providing a practical way to systematically probe the impact of lived experience and context on their expression.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Same emotion, different stimuli: A context-sensitive method to evoke nostalgia

  PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) · 2026-03-24

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Lived experience and current context are critical antecedents of emotions. However, practical methodologies for incorporating these factors into experimental emotion research remain scarce. We developed and tested an idiographic-nomothetic method to evoke a prototypically situated emotion: nostalgia. We describe the iterative qualitative and quantitative method, which involved 1) choosing cross-cultural target populations to manipulate present vs developmental context, 2) creating a conceptually and visually standardized food image set, 3) testing the nomothetic and idiographic factors in nostalgia, 4) measuring the outcomes’ replicability, and 5) testing the relation of state to global trait nostalgia. The method was examined on US university students who share the same current environment but originate from two distinct developmental contexts (USA vs. India). Across two cohorts, nostalgic value exhibited an idiographically nomothetic pattern: vast variances between individuals coexisted alongside a cross-cultural pattern of high nostalgia for developmentally consistent foods within a person, which was greater for the culture further displaced from home. Nostalgia for food was consistent across time; high test-retest reliability was on par with food familiarity. Global trait nostalgia contributed to the propensity and intensity of evoked state nostalgia. We discuss this method’s usefulness for bridging phenomenological and positivist accounts of emotions while providing a practical way to systematically probe the impact of lived experience and context on their expression.

  Publisher

• Age and gender-related patterns of arterial transit time and cerebral blood flow in healthy adults

  NeuroImage · 2025-02-21 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  • We detect age-related arterial transit time (ATT) and ATT-corrected CBF patterns. • ATT increases with age in the frontal, temporoparietal, and occipital regions. • Without ATT correction, age-related CBF patterns generated artifact regions. • The findings emphasize ATT's role and its importance in CBF measurement for aging. Normal aging has been associated with increased arterial transit time (ATT) and reduced cerebral blood flow (CBF). However, age-related patterns of ATT and CBF and their relationship remain unclear. This is partly due to the lengthy scan times required for ATT measurements, which caused previous age-related CBF studies to not fully account for transit time. In this work, we aimed to elucidate age-related ATT and ATT-corrected CBF patterns. We examined 131 healthy subjects aged 19 to 82 years old using two pseudo-continuous arterial spin labeling (PCASL) MRI scans: one to measure fast low-resolution ATT maps with five post-labeling delays and the other to measure high-resolution perfusion-weighted maps with a single post-labeling delay. Both ATT and perfusion-weighed maps were applied with vessel suppression. We found that ATT increases with age in the frontal, temporoparietal, and occipital regions, with a more pronounced elongation in males compared to females in the middle temporal gyrus. ATT-corrected CBF decreases with age in several brain regions, including the anterior cingulate, insula, posterior cingulate, angular, precuneus, supramarginal, frontal, parietal, superior and middle temporal, occipital, and cerebellar regions, while remaining stable in the inferior temporal and subcortical regions. In contrast, without ATT correction, we detected artifactual decreases in the inferior temporal and precentral regions. These findings suggest that ATT provides valuable and independent insights into microvascular deficits and should be incorporated into CBF measurements for studies involving aging populations.

  PublisherDOI

• Children Use Others’ Talk about Emotions to Make Social Choices

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Blood oxygenation level-dependent responses in neuromodulatory nuclei and their associations with attention and memory across age groups

  Neurobiology of Aging · 2025-07-16 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Age-related differences in locus coeruleus intensity across a demographically diverse sample

  Neurobiology of Aging · 2025-03-13 · 9 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Age-associated alterations of brain networks using dynamic ASL

  Proceedings on CD-ROM - International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine. Scientific Meeting and Exhibition/Proceedings of the International Society for Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, Scientific Meeting and Exhibition · 2025-09-16

  article

  Motivation: Motion may affect age-related discrepancy in resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) in BOLD imaging studies. Dynamic arterial spin labeling (DASL) offers an alternative, detecting large-scale network rsFC with fewer motion artifacts. However, the aging effects on DASL rsFC remain unexplored. Goal(s): We examined how brain networks evolve with age using DASL. Approach: We used a data-driven approach to measure rsFC within and between brain networks in 131 adults. Results: Older age correlated with reduced intra-network rsFC in the ventral stream (VSN), sensorimotor, left frontoparietal (LFPN), right frontoparietal, default mode (DMN), salience (SN), and frontal networks, and decreased inter-network rsFC between LFPN-SN, VSN-SN, and DMN-SN. Impact: The rsFC of DASL may offer additional knowledge about the aging brain in the healthy adults and increase our insight into the neural basis of neurodegenerative disease.

  PublisherDOI

• Attention-dependent coupling with forebrain and brainstem neuromodulatory nuclei differs across the lifespan

  GeroScience · 2025-03-04 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Attentional states reflect the changing behavioral relevance of stimuli in one's environment, having important consequences for learning and memory. Supporting well-established cortical contributions, attentional states are hypothesized to originate from subcortical neuromodulatory nuclei, such as the basal forebrain (BF) and locus coeruleus (LC), which are among the first to change with aging. Here, we characterized the interplay between BF and LC neuromodulatory nuclei and their relation to two common afferent cortical targets important for attention and memory, the posterior cingulate cortex and hippocampus, across the adult lifespan. Using an auditory target discrimination task during functional MRI, we examined the influence of attentional and behavioral salience on task-dependent functional connectivity in younger (19-45 years) and older adults (66-86 years). In younger adults, BF functional connectivity was largely driven by target processing, while LC connectivity was associated with distractor processing. These patterns are reversed in older adults. This age-dependent connectivity pattern generalized to the nucleus basalis of Meynert and medial septal subnuclei. Preliminary data from middle-aged adults indicates a transitional stage in BF and LC functional connectivity. Overall, these results reveal distinct roles of subcortical neuromodulatory systems in attentional salience related to behavioral relevance and their potential reversed roles with aging, consistent with managing increased salience of behaviorally irrelevant distraction in older adults. Such prominent differences in functional coupling across the lifespan from these subcortical neuromodulatory nuclei suggests they may be drivers of widespread cortical changes in neurocognitive aging, and middle age as an opportune time for intervention.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Vagal nerve stimulation alters task-evoked pupillary responses in older adults but not younger adults in a single-blind sham-controlled crossover trial

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025-10-10

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Introduction The locus coeruleus (LC) undergoes age-related changes and is involved in Alzheimer’s disease pathogenesis. Vagal nerve stimulation (VNS) may modulate LC activity and could be used therapeutically, but age-related differences in VNS responses remain unexplored. Methods We used a single-blind, sham-controlled, crossover design in 41 participants (21 younger, 20 older adults). Participants completed a visual oddball task with pupillometry during transcutaneous auricular VNS (verum: cymba concha; sham: earlobe) with ∼30-minute washout between conditions. Results Older adults showed smaller baseline pupil diameter but larger normalized task-evoked responses than younger adults a priori. VNS produced age-specific effects: older adults demonstrated increased tonic pupil size throughout stimulation and reduced oddball-evoked responses, with stronger effects with more current. Younger adults showed no consistent VNS effects. Discussion VNS affects LC-related physiological measures differently across age groups, with older adults showing more robust responses. These age-specific effects may reflect different baseline LC activity states.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Zindel V. Segal

  50 shared

• Norman A. S. Farb

  41 shared

• Rebecca M. Todd

  39 shared

• Eve De Rosa

  Cornell University

  31 shared

• Brian Levine

  24 shared

• Daniela J. Palombo

  University of British Columbia

  22 shared

• Mana R. Ehlers

  Bielefeld University

  20 shared

• Hanah A. Chapman

  Brooklyn College

  14 shared

Awards & honors

• APA Early Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribu…
• Cognitive Neuroscience Society Young Investigator Award