Ajay Satpute

Professor · University of California, Los Angeles · University of California, Los Angeles

⭐ Of note, my lab will be accepting students for the upcoming cycle.

Research interests

My lab studies the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying social and emotional experiences in humans. We design brain imaging experiments and use machine learning techniques to address fundamental theoretical questions such as: How does brain activity relate with feelings and emotions including pleasure, fear, and even moral outrage? How do we represent other people as social agents with thoughts and feelings of their own? And what role does language play in shaping emotion? We approach these questions using predictive processing and constructionist theories of brain-behavior relationships.

Selected publications (since 2023)

Fiedler, S. A., Lee, K. M., Nook, E. C., Lindquist, K. A., Gendron, M., & Satpute, A. B. (2025). Affective abstraction predicts variation in alexithymia, depression, and autism spectrum quotient. Emotion, 25(7), 1730–1749. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001497 Iancarelli, A., Rypkema, N. R., Ritchey, M., & Satpute, A. B. (2025). The Affective Science Network: A fieldwide map of over 1 Million citations. Affective science, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-024-00292-8 McVeigh, K., Kleckner, I. R., Quigley, K. S., & Satpute, A. B. (2024). Fear-related psychophysiological patterns are situation and individual dependent: A Bayesian model comparison approach. Emotion, 24(2), 506–521. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001265 Wang, Y., Kragel, P. A., & Satpute, A. B. (2024). Neural predictors of fear d

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