Elizabeth A. Phelps

About

Elizabeth A. Phelps is the Pershing Square Professor of Human Neuroscience at Harvard University. She is the director of the Phelps Lab, which is part of the Harvard Department of Psychology. Her contact information includes her email phelps@fas.harvard.edu, and her office is located at the Northwest Lab Building, 52 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, Office #295.10, with phone number 617-496-1128. The lab focuses on research related to human neuroscience, and she is involved in mentoring post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, lab managers, visiting fellows, and research assistants. Her work emphasizes understanding the neural mechanisms underlying human cognition and emotion, contributing significantly to the field of neuroscience.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Neuroscience
• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Psychiatry
• Cognitive science

Selected publications

• Prefrontal cortex, amygdala, and threat processing: implications for PTSD

  Neuropsychopharmacology · 2021 · 307 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Posttraumatic stress disorder can be viewed as a disorder of fear dysregulation. An abundance of research suggests that the prefrontal cortex is central to fear processing-that is, how fears are acquired and strategies to regulate or diminish fear responses. The current review covers foundational research on threat or fear acquisition and extinction in nonhuman animals, healthy humans, and patients with posttraumatic stress disorder, through the lens of the involvement of the prefrontal cortex i…

  DOI

• Tag and capture: how salient experiences target and rescue nearby events in memory

  Trends in Cognitive Sciences · 2022 · 77 citations

  DOI

• Survival of the salient: Aversive learning rescues otherwise forgettable memories via neural reactivation and post-encoding hippocampal connectivity

  Neurobiology of Learning and Memory · 2021 · 47 citations

  DOI

• Consensus design of a calibration experiment for human fear conditioning

  Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews · 2023-03-27 · 42 citations

  reviewOpen access

  Fear conditioning is a widely used laboratory model to investigate learning, memory, and psychopathology across species. The quantification of learning in this paradigm is heterogeneous in humans and psychometric properties of different quantification methods can be difficult to establish. To overcome this obstacle, calibration is a standard metrological procedure in which well-defined values of a latent variable are generated in an established experimental paradigm. These intended values then s…

  PublisherDOI

• Distributed neural representations of conditioned threat in the human brain

  Nature Communications · 2024-03-12 · 37 citations

  articleOpen access

  Detecting and responding to threat engages several neural nodes including the amygdala, hippocampus, insular cortex, and medial prefrontal cortices. Recent propositions call for the integration of more distributed neural nodes that process sensory and cognitive facets related to threat. Integrative, sensitive, and reproducible distributed neural decoders for the detection and response to threat and safety have yet to be established. We combine functional MRI data across varying threat conditioni…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01AG039283

  NIH · $2.1M · 2016

• NIH Grant R29MH050812

  NIH · $528k · 2000

• NIH Grant R01MH080756

  NIH · $1.9M · 2013

Frequent coauthors

• Joseph E. Dunsmoor

  The University of Texas at Austin

  58 shared

• Mahzarin R. Banaji

  Harvard University

  42 shared

• Elizabeth V. Goldfarb

  Yale University

  41 shared

• Daniela Schiller

  Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

  39 shared

• Joseph E. LeDoux

  36 shared

• Mauricio R. Delgado

  31 shared

• Vishnu P. Murty

  Temple University

  31 shared

• John C. Gore

  Vanderbilt University

  30 shared

Labs

• Phelps LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Psychology

  Princeton University

  1992

• B.A., Psychology

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1987

Awards & honors

• 21st Century Scientist Award from the James S. McDonnell Fou…
• Distinguished Scholar Award from the Social and Affective Ne…
• William James Award from the Association for Psychological S…
• Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sc…
• Fellow of the Society for Experimental Psychology

Similar researchers at Harvard University

• Randy L. Bucknerh-268
• Daniel L. Schacterh-181
• Matthew K. Nockh-126