RESEARCH

Dr. Ephrem Fernandez runs two separate but symbiotic labs: one in the area of sensation and the other in the area of affect science.  For convenience, the term “emotion-sensation” is used to label our website.

Sensory research
Within the sensory area, our focus is on pain; the main project here is the NIH-funded study on psychometric and semantic approaches to natural language assessment of pain.  We are also interested in cross-linguistic validation of our Pain Descriptor System.  What pain lab would be complete without pain-induction equipment?  We have an array of devices for precision-oriented experimental induction of pain; this is used to validate some of our work on clinical populations.

Affective research
Within the affective area, there has been much research on anxiety, depression, and anger as a construct called the “core of negative affect”.  Our current focus is on anger – its many parameters and expression styles as evident in clinical settings and in everyday life. In conjunction with overseas research teams, we are generating norms and psychometric properties for two of our anger tests — the APS and the AES.  We do not induce anger in our lab but we are pioneering a new integrative therapy called CBAT for the prevention, intervention, and remediation of anger.