Maital Neta, Ph.D.
Pronouns: she, her
SDSU MRI Center Director | Professor of Psychology
Department of Psychology
Neuroscience
College of Sciences
SDSU
Primary Email: [email protected]
Building/Location
5500 Campanile Dr.
San Diego,
CA
92182
Website Links
Bio
Dr. Neta is the MRI Center Director and Director of the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (CAN) Lab. She received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from Dartmouth College in 2010 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Neurology at Washington University in 2014.
She then served for 12 years on the faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, rising from Assistant Professor to the Happold Professor and Associate Director of the Center for Brain, Biology, and Behavior (CB3). Her research capitalizes on a number of methods from psychology and neuroscience to examine ambiguity resolution in the domain of emotion. Specifically, although some expressions provide clear predictive information that something good (e.g., happy) or bad (e.g., angry) will happen, other expressions, like surprise, have predicted both positive (e.g., birthday party) and negative (e.g., car accident) events for us in the past.
When presented in the absence of contextual information, these ambiguously valenced expressions can be used to delineate a valence bias: ambiguous stimuli are stably interpreted negatively by some people and positively by others. We explore individual differences in valence bias in a variety of ways: (1) by examining the mechanisms that drive people toward a more positive or negative valence bias, (2) determining that factors that shape the development of a particular bias, and (3) testing interventions that can shift bias, particularly in circumstances when it interferences with healthy functioning (e.g., depression).
Her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. In 2024, she was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) - the highest award bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers.
Areas of Specialization
Affective Neuroscience, Emotion, Individual Differences, Valence Bias, Emotion Regulation