Sanda Monica Dolcos

About

Sanda Monica Dolcos is a Research Assistant Professor in the departments of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Illinois. She is also a program affiliate of the Social & Behavioral Sciences Institute. Her research focuses on the neural correlates of emotion-cognition interactions, with particular emphasis on brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Dolcos investigates the divergent effects of emotion on cognition, including how arousal influences memory for details surrounding unpleasant events and the mechanisms underlying emotion regulation. Her work integrates multimodal imaging approaches to study human brain function and plasticity, contributing to emerging methods and applications in cognitive enhancement and brain plasticity. Dolcos has also explored the role of sex differences in the link between emotion regulation and psychological well-being during major mental health crises, as well as moral judgment processes under uncertainty. Her research outputs include numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters that advance understanding of episodic memory, amygdala function, and the neural basis of behavior in clinical and healthy populations.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Clinical psychology
• Neuroscience
• Social psychology
• Computer Science
• Psychotherapist
• Psychiatry
• Communication

Selected publications

• Religiosity and Resilience: Cognitive Reappraisal and Coping Self-Efficacy Mediate the Link between Religious Coping and Well-Being

  Journal of Religion and Health · 2021 · 136 citations

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Measuring cognitive flexibility: A brief review of neuropsychological, self-report, and neuroscientific approaches

  Frontiers in Human Neuroscience · 2024-02-19 · 72 citations

  reviewOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Cognitive flexibility involves dynamic processes that allow adaptation of our thinking and behavior in response to changing contextual demands. Despite a large consensus about its beneficial effects, cognitive flexibility is still poorly understood. In this mini review, we examined the main conceptualizations and approaches for assessing cognitive flexibility: (1) neuropsychological tasks, (2) self-report questionnaires, and (3) neuroscientific approaches. The reviewed evidence shows that the de…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Human Affectome

  Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews · 2023 · 57 citations

  Over the last decades, theoretical perspectives in the interdisciplinary field of the affective sciences have proliferated rather than converged due to differing assumptions about what human affective phenomena are and how they work. These metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions, shaped by academic context and values, have dictated affective constructs and operationalizations. However, an assumption about the purpose of affective phenomena can guide us to a common set of metaphysical and mechan…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Intrinsic functional network contributions to the relationship between trait empathy and subjective happiness

  NeuroImage · 2020 · 30 citations

  Subjective happiness (well-being) is a multi-dimensional construct indexing one's evaluations of everyday emotional experiences and life satisfaction, and has been associated with different aspects of trait empathy. Despite previous research identifying the neural substrates of subjective happiness and empathy, the mechanisms mediating the relationship between the two constructs remain largely unclear. Here, we performed a data-driven, multi-voxel pattern analysis of whole-brain intrinsic functi…

  PublisherDOI

• The Impact of Focused Attention on Emotional Experience: A Functional MRI Investigation

  Cognitive Affective & Behavioral Neuroscience · 2020-08-07 · 20 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Florin Dolcos

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  72 shared

• Yuta Katsumi

  Harvard University

  25 shared

• Ekaterina Denkova

  University of Miami

  24 shared

• Matthew Moore

  Stanford University

  16 shared

• Alexandru D. Iordan

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  12 shared

• Paul C. Bogdan

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  11 shared

• Yifan Hu

  Changhai Hospital

  9 shared

• Susanne Becker

  9 shared

Labs

• Dolcos LabPI

  Social and Personality Neuroscience, Affective Neuroscience, Cognitive and Affective Aging, Emotional Wellbeing

Similar researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

• Monica Fabianih-70
• Kara D Federmeierh-58