🚨Check out our latest paper from the lab! Great work @morales-calva.bsky.social !

🚨Attending ISPNE in New Orleans?🚨

Be sure to stop by graduate student Beatriz Brandao’s poster today 9/3 5:30 - 8 pm.

She will be discussing results from her recently published Hormones & Behavior paper examining emotion regulation and memory in hormonal contraceptive users!

When examining memory, we found that HC users who applied ER strategies during encoding showed reduced negative lure discrimination and increased positive lure discrimination.

Participants rated their negative and positive affect during encoding. Then, we tested participants memory for the images.

We found that HC users showed more successful ER use, particularly those using the distancing and immersion strategies.

We trained participants in several emotion regulation strategies (distancing and reinterpretation towards negative images and immersion towards positive images). Participants applied these strategies during encoding of an emotional mnemonic discrimination task.

Check out our latest paper published in Hormones & Behavior!

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

We found that hormonal contraceptive users were better able to apply trained emotion regulation strategies, which reduced negative memory!

What we discover at UCLA goes far beyond our lab - this work is meant to make an impact on society to change how we treat conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, depression, and PTSD. #ResearchPowersProgress
🧠🎼💙💛
newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/mus...

🚨Attending SBN?🚨

Stop by graduate student Beatriz Brandao’s poster tomorrow Tuesday July 15 4:30-6:30pm (Poster Session 2, #32) examining the impact of hormonal contraceptive use on memory and emotion regulation! #SBN2025

10 more minutes to stop by!

🚨Attending APS 2025?🚨

Be sure to stop by @morales-calva.bsky.social poster TODAY from 4-5pm! Fernanda will be presenting her work examining cultural impacts on perception and memory. Details below. #APS25DC

So incredibly proud of the two graduates from the lab today!! Lorena is the first PhD student to graduate from my lab, and Maddie received her Masters along the way to her PhD! Enjoy and celebrate these moments! 💙

Congratulations to graduate student @morales-calva.bsky.social for winning the 2025 Excellence in Research, Teaching, & Service Award in the Psychological Sciences Department at Rice University! So proud of you!

Congratulations to the Leal Lab RAs for presenting their research projects at the Undergraduate Research Symposium! Great job! Extra congrats to Jacob, Ahi, and Giselle for winning awards for their presentations! 🎉

Congratulations to Madelyn Castro for successfully defending her masters thesis today AND for being awarded the 2025 Laughery Award for the Best Master’s Thesis in Psychology! So proud of you!❤️

Congratulations to the first graduate student in my lab, Dr. Lorena Ferguson, who successfully defended her dissertation today! So proud of you and all your accomplishments 🥹

Attending SAS? Come see graduate student Beatriz Brandao’s flash talk on the effects of hormonal contraceptives on emotion regulation and emotional reactivity on Sat, March 22 11:15am! Details below 👇🏻

My lab at UCLA is recruiting a research coordinator to start ASAP, who will be involved in lab and research management and take the lead in MRI & PET imaging data collection & analysis in aging! Please reach out if interested (& please share widely). Apps due by Feb 16!
jobs.ucla.edu/careers-home...

🚨New paper out in Learning & Memory!🚨

We examined how current perceived stress impacts emotional memory and found that high AND low current perceived stress enhanced emotional memories.

learnmem.cshlp.org/content/31/1...