Clone of Sleep & Emotion Regulation Laboratory

Dr. Ilana Hairston – Head of Laboratory

Mail: [email protected]

MA students:

Yekete Akal – M.A. student (Effects of ethnic bias in the identification of emotional facial expressions among children)

Zeher Naser Eldeen – M.A. student (Parenting style and child’s sleep in Arab Families)

Yuval Shmueli – M.A. student (The effect of implicit color associations on experimental pain learning in classical conditioning)

Dana Zelinger – M.A. student (Mapping similarities in child and parent sleep patterns: AN actigraphy study)

While negative rumination, which elicits negative emotions, has been shown to interfere with sleep, it is unknown whether this is a feature of the repetitive thought processes involved in rumination or of the negative emotional arousal.  We are trying to address this question through the induction of positive rumination.

Identifying emotional responses is key to social communication and function. While evidence from North America and Europe suggests that ethnic and gender stereotypes impact recognition of facial expressions, such studies have not been done in Israel. We have been working on creating a dataset of Israeli actors, from different ethnic and gender identities, with various emotional expression to be able to test the effects of stereotypes in Israeli society on emotional communication.

תמונה

Parent to infant bonding is a construct that describes parental emotions and cognitions towards their child. Bonding is a process that begins during pregnancy and continues postpartum, potentially throughout the life of the parent. Parental emotional states clearly play a pivotal role in child development, less is known about the processes that affect parental emotions and their trajectory.

In collaboration with Prof. Tali Bitan, from Haifa University, we are trying to determine whether feature of sleep, such as sleep spindles and certain EEG frequencies, are associated with learning words and grammatical rules of a new language.