Stéphanie Dubal

 

 

I am a CNRS Research Scientist in the Social and Affective Neuroscience (SAN) team at the ICM (institute du Cerveau et de la Moelle Epiniere).

I received a Masters Degree in Neuropsychology from the University of Lyon, France in 1995, and a PhD in Cognitive Science at University Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6). After a year as a postdoc at Harvard University, Cambridge, USA, under the supervision of Prof. Philip Holzman, I was recruited as a CNRS researcher in 2000 to work in the Emotion Center in the Psychiatry department of the La Salpêtrière Hospital.

I got a qualification for research supervision (HDR) in 2010 (UPMC Paris 6 University). In 2014, I moved to the Brain and Spine Institute as one of the founding members of the Affective and Social Neuroscience team together with Nathalie George and Philippe Fossati.

 

Project

 

I explore the reciprocal interactions of affect and vision. I focus on the temporal resolution of perceptive modulations of vision by emotion and their anatomical localization. I also question the effect of such interaction on subjective perception.  We have previously found evidence that emotional content of stimuli has an early influence on visual processing of information in visual brain areas and at the level of subjective perception. These results suggest that emotional modulation processes may alter perceptual activity. One hypothesis is that an amplification of visual activity would increase attention to relevant stimuli such as affective ones. I am currently studying how affect modulates visual perception per se, using the neuroimaging techniques EEG, MEG and fMRI, and psychophysics models developed by K.Knoblauch to test the behavioural impact of the visual amplification activity for affective stimuli.

We also focus on how affective disturbances affect perceptual processing of information, based on the study of clinical dimension such as anhedonia.

 

Some representative publications

 

Morel, S., George, N., Foucher, A., Chammat, M., & Dubal, S. (2014). ERP evidence for an early emotional bias towards happy faces in trait anxiety. Biological Psychology 99, 183-192. 

 

Dubal S, Foucher A, Jouvent R, Nadel J (2011) Human brain spots emotion in non humanoid robots. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 6:90–97.

 

Chammat M, Foucher A, Nadel J, Dubal S (2010) Reading sadness beyond human faces. Brain Res 1348:95–104.

 

Rey G, Knoblauch K, Prévost M, Komano O, Jouvent R, Dubal S (2010) Visual modulation of pleasure in subjects with physical and social anhedonia. Psychiatry Res 176:155–160.

 

Dubal S, Viaud-Delmon I (2008) Magical ideation and hyperacusis. Cortex 44:1379–1386.