Oriel FeldmanHall

About

Oriel FeldmanHall is the Lab Director at FeldmanHallLab and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge as well as a BA from Cornell University. She completed her postdoctoral training at New York University (NYU). Her research interests focus on understanding the neural basis of human social behavior, particularly in areas such as morality, altruism, trust, and reciprocity. Throughout her career, she has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Cognitive Neuroscience Society’s Young Investigator Award for outstanding contributions to science, the Association for Psychological Science’s Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions, and the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology. In addition to her research, she teaches courses including Social Psychology (CLPS 700), the Moral Brain (CLPS 1760), and From Neuroeconomics to Political Polarization (CLPS 1740). Outside of her professional work, she enjoys reading early 19th century novels, dreaming about sky-diving in the Namib desert, and spending time with her energetic children.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Virology
• Developmental psychology

Selected publications

• Emotional responses to prosocial messages increase willingness to self-isolate during the COVID-19 pandemic

  Personality and Individual Differences · 2020 · 220 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Early insight into social network structure predicts climbing the social ladder

  Science Advances · 2025-06-20 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  While occupying an influential position within one’s social network brings many advantages, it is unknown how certain individuals rise in social prominence. Leveraging a longitudinal dataset that tracks an entirely new network of college freshmen ( N = 187), we test whether “climbing the social ladder” depends on knowing how other people are connected to each other. Those who ultimately come to occupy the most influential positions exhibit early and accurate representations of their network’s ge…

  PublisherDOI

• Separable neural signals for reward and emotion prediction errors

  Nature Communications · 2025-08-22 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Reinforcement learning models focus on reward prediction errors as the driver of behavior. However, recent evidence indicates that deviations from emotion expectations, termed affective prediction errors, also crucially shape behavior. Whether there is neural separability between emotion and reward signals remains unknown. We employ electroencephalography during social learning to investigate the neural signatures of reward and affective prediction errors. Behavioral results reveal that affectiv…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Knowledge of information cascades through social networks facilitates strategic gossip

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2025-07-01 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Politically extreme individuals exhibit similar neural processing despite ideological differences.

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2025-08-28 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  The current state of political polarization in the United States encompasses a growing divide between partisans and a shift toward more extreme ideologies. Although rising ideological extremism poses societal challenges, the mechanisms supporting extreme views remain uncharacterized. Leveraging a combination of neurophysiological methods, we show that regardless of which side of the political aisle an individual is on, those with more extreme views show heightened neural activity to politically…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Administrative Core

  NIH · $46.6M · 2013–2025

• NCS-FO: Cognitive maps as a framework for organizing relationships in large-scale real social networks

  NSF · $776k · 2021–2024

Frequent coauthors

• Marc–Lluís Vives

  Leiden University

  54 shared

• Tim Dalgleish

  Medical Research Council

  49 shared

• Dean Mobbs

  45 shared

• Jeroen M. van Baar

  Brown University

  44 shared

• Matthew R. Nassar

  Allen Institute for Brain Science

  44 shared

• Joseph Heffner

  Yale University

  44 shared

• Apoorva Bhandari

  43 shared

• Jae-Young Son

  43 shared

Labs

• FeldmanHallLabPI

Awards & honors

• Cognitive Neuroscience Society’s Young Investigator Award fo…
• APS's Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Car…
• Social and Affective Neuroscience Society Early Career Award…
• Society for Neuroeconomics Early Career Award (2020)
• NARSAD's Young Investigator Award (2017)

Similar researchers at Brown University

• Thomas Serreh-145
• Michael Frankh-120
• Bertram F. Malleh-65