Yu Gao, Ph.D.

Principle Investigator

Associate Professor of Psychology

5602C James Hall

Department of Psychology

Brooklyn College

The Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Email: yugao at brooklyn.cuny.edu

Office: 718-951-5000 x 6033

Fax: 718-951-4814

Graduate Students:

Shawn Fagan

Shawn earned her B.A. from Columbia University and her M.A. from the University of Chicago. She is now a second year doctoral student in the Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience program. She is interested in emotion regulation and cognitive reappraisal as they relate to moral action and decision making. She is also interested in understanding how social adversity and parenting styles affect the development of antisocial behavior.

Liat Zitron

Liat is currently a doctoral student in the Cognition, Brain and Behavior Psychology program at the Graduate center, CUNY. She is a licensed mental health counselor, and had earned a master’s degree in Mental Health Counseling from Brooklyn College. Additionally, she holds a master’s degree in Industrial and Organizational Psychology from Brooklyn College. She received her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Touro College, NY. Liat is interested in the transmission of family violence as it manifests in the relationship between parental aggression and children’s adjustment behaviors. She is particularly interested is early identification of externalizing behaviors in children, and potential means for prevention and intervention.

Melissa Huang

Melissa is a first year student in the M.A. Experimental Psychology program. She graduated from Brooklyn College in 2015 with her B.A. in Psychology and minor in Neuroscience. She plans to pursue research in the etiology of psychopathy. Because psychopathic traits emerge early on in life and endure through adulthood, Melissa is particularly interested in investigating its biological and environmental correlates through different developmental stages (e.g. prenatal, childhood, adolescence). She will join the Doctoral program in fall 2017. 

Hélio Clemente Cuve

Hélio is currently a Fulbright Scholar Student in the Experimental Psychology MA. program at Brooklyn College. He earned is B.A in Psychology in 2015 from Eduardo Mondlane University in Mozambique, and then went to pursuit a post bachelor studies in Clinical and Health Psychology, at the University of Beira Interior in Portugal. His research interests focus on the neurobiological and behavioral correlates of emotion recognition and facial expression, in general and clinical populations like Autism, Depression and Psychopathy. He is interested on how emotion recognition relates to emotion regulation and social functioning.

Lab Alumni

Wei Zhang (wzhang2 at gradcenter.cuny.edu)

Wei Zhang was a Ph. D. candidate in the Cognition, Brain and Behavior psychology program at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She received her master’s degree in Psychology from Pace University and her bachelor’s degree in English from South China University of Technology. She is broadly interested in the mechanisms of emotion and cognitive processes. To address this topic, she uses a combination of behavior and psychophysiological methods (e.g., ECG, ICG, EDA, RSA, PEP, HRV, and ERP). She is also interested in the biosocial bases of externalizing behaviors. Currently, she is investigating the biosocial interaction effects for the development of antisocial behavior using mediation/moderation models, latent profile models, longitudinal cross-sectional methods, and structural equation models. Wei is now a postdoc researcher at Queens College.