Hillel Aviezer, PhD

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I graduated the clinical neuropsychology program at Hebrew University and completed my PhD under the supervision of Ran Hassin and Shlomo Bentin. In my postdoctoral research I worked with Alex Todorov at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute at Princeton University. I am currently a senior lecturer at the psychology department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and director of the Affective Neuropsychology Lab. Our research focuses on how people express and perceive social and emotional signals in various interpersonal channels. An important line of research in the lab aims to understand the neural underpinnings of emotion perception in both healthy individuals and neuropsychological populations including Huntington’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease, as well as individuals with Visual Agnosia and Prosopagnosia. 

Contact email: haviezer[at]huji.ac.il

My research focuses on individual differences in the susceptibility to context. Specifically, I attempt to characterize individual differences in context effects when perceiving emotion from the face.

I am currently a Ph.D. student in Clinical- Neuropsychology program at the Psychology Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

I am interested in the role of emotional bodily expressions in emotion recognition processes in Parkinson Disease patients and healthy people. My additional focus of interest is emotion recognition and perception through affective knowledge.

Neta Yitzhak is a PhD Candidate in Psychology. Neta's primary research interests relate to perception of subtle facial expressions, both in healthy individuals and neuropsychological populations. She received her MA in clinical neuropsychology and BA in psychobiology from the Hebrew university.

What are the neural mechanisms behind our social behavior? What cognitive abilities allow us to interact effectively? These are the kind of questions I’m interested in. My PhD is focused on automatic reactions to emotional expressions, looking into the mechanisms behind this phenomenon.

My research focuses on understanding the role of language and semantic knowledge in emotion perception. as part of my thesis I wish to develop language-free tests to measure emotion perception independently from language, while manipulating language itself in order to study its causal influence. Finally, I wish to examine the direct influence of language loss on emotion perception in a clinical population, specifically people who suffer from Aphasia.  

Doron Atias is a PhD student in the Department of Psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He studies the perception of real-life emotional vocalizations. Specifically, his research combines cognitive neuroscience and social psychology methods to explore how visual context may construct the perception of real-life vocalizations.

Doron received his MA in clinical neuropsychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his BA in psychology and economics from Ben-Gurion university of the Negev.

Hadasa Avramovich is a master’s level student studying clinical psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

She received her B.A. in Psychology and Multidisciplinary studies in the humanities and social sciences, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be'er-Sheva, Israel.

Thesis: perception of subtle facial expressions in patients with Huntington disease.

My research interests involve  neuro-cognitive mechanisms underlying expressing and perceiving highly intense emotions. 

Additional research projects:

• Perceptual mechanisms underlying emotion recognition deficits in Developmental Visual Agnosia, under the supervision of Dr. Hillel Aviezer.

• Correlation between deficits in emotional expression recognition and difficulty in integration of expressive action unites, joint project with Dr. Hillel Aviezer. 

Thesis: Aftereffects in the perception of emotional gait patterns.

Thesis: Impaired facial expression recognition in otherwise healthy individuals: Characteristics and mechanisms.

Thesis: Affect Recognition from Faces or Bodies; Isolated and Combined as a Function of Distance.