Welcome to my webpage!
I am an experimental psychophysiologist working in the field of behavioural and cognitive neuroscience using psychophysiological techniques. I study neurobiological signals that predict learning outcomes, for example through motivational affect and saliency. I run an EEG lab and have a wonderful team of RAs that help unveil the cortical intricacies of our emotions, perceptions, how we attend to our internal and external environments, and how we handle uncertainty especially potentially threatening situations.
My research interests range from basic neuroscience concepts and mechanisms such as cortical processing (visual attention, oscillatory EEG, face processing) to more intricate questions involving affect, decision-making, error processing, and reinforcement learning. Many of these topics have lent themselves well to research in clinical psychology, such as fear, anxiety and trauma disorders.
I received my PhD under the guidance of Dr. Andreas Keil at the University of Florida in the Spring of 2017. Both my masters thesis and dissertation work at the Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention (CSEA) lab dealt with various aspects of aversive conditioning in humans, using EEG and psychophysiological measurements. While my masters thesis emphasized the role of the COMT val158met polymorphism in threat responding and perceptual processing, my dissertation work focused more heavily on initial threat reactivity significantly predicting later extinction learning and threat expectancy.
I was a postdoctoral researcher for two years at Vanderbilt University, Psychology Department, investigating visual attention through EEG measures (ERPs and ssVEPs). Following this, I was a postdoc at the University of South Florida, College of Nursing, in the field of Psycho-Oncology for one year. I was also a Visiting Professor of Psychology at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, for an additional year. I am now an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Tampa.
My teaching primarily focuses on Biopsychology, Physiological Psychology, Behavioral Neuroscience, Sensation and Perception, and Statistics and Experimental Methods. I have also designed special topics courses such as Trauma and the Brain, and enjoy teaching Introduction to Psychology / General Psychology. I actively integrate my research into my teaching materials, as well as utilizing the laboratory as an excellent mentoring and hands-on opportunity for undergraduate students.
L. Forest G. Rosenfeld, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Department of Psychology
University of Tampa
CONTACT
lrosenfeld@ut.edu
Updates
*** Spring 2024 ***
Data collection has started in the CPL lab and we got our first two grants awarded!! An internal grant to acquire an EKG system, which will be great to use with the threat learning work, as well as pilot data towards mindfulness and deep breathing. A second internal grant to recruit young breast cancer survivors was awarded and we will be assessing psychophysiological markers of fear of cancer recurrence. Lot of data collection happening next year! How cool!!
*** June 2022 ***
I have accepted a tenure-track position as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Tampa!! I’m ecstatic to join the Department of Psychology and have the opportunity to teach and mentor Spartans in the classroom and the laboratory. Over the next few months I’ll be working on getting my lab set up and I’ll be teaching Biopsychology and Statistics in the Fall. I’m so excited!!
*** October 2020 ***
Check out my research talk for my poster presented at the Annual (Virtual 2020) Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR) conference. It’s a brief 12min discussion of two pilots studies I ran at Vanderbilt University, trying to investigate interactive effects of transient ERPs and oscillatory ssVEP signals.
*** AUGust 2019 ***
USF Health
Guess I should stop wearing the Vanderbilt lanyard…
I have started a new postdoc position at the University of South Florida! Very exciting to delve more into clinical work, broadly focused on cognitive impairment in breast cancer survivors. First goal for the semester will be to write a K99/R00 - let’s get this party started!!
*** May 2019 ***
Invited to give a symposium talk at SPR this year for the Faces of the Future Flash Talk on our work extending the Nat Comm paper on fear generalization. The results of this work have significant implications of safety processing during threat learning. Should be fun!
*** November 2018 ***
Part of my dissertation work on threat expectancy was finally accepted for publication in Biological Psychology!
The title of the paper is descriptive of the main results, but in short: threat reactivity (in terms of sympathetic responding measured as skin conductance responding) during initial threat acquisition later predicted extinction responding. Individuals who were highly reactive (greater SCR) displayed greater visuocortical discrimination, heart rate deceleration and self-reported threat expectancy in response to CS+ stimuli in extinction. Multivariate multiple regression was the main analysis performed, with model fitting of the self-reported threat expectancy ratings to the Rescorla-Wagner Learning Rule serving as a construct validity check.
Gruss, L. F., & Keil, A. (2019). Sympathetic responding to unconditioned stimuli predicts subsequent threat expectancy, orienting and visuocortical bias in human aversive Pavlovian conditioning. Biological Psychology, 140, 64-74.
*** October 2018 ***
The changeface project and its many iterations finally got accepted in Cortex, so exciting!!!
Campagnoli, R. R., Wieser, M. J., Gruss, L. F., McTeague, L. M., Boylan, M. R., & Keil, A. (2019). How the visual brain detects emotional changes in facial expressions: Evidence from driven and intrinsic brain oscillations. Cortex.