Elizabeth A. Phelps
Cognitive neuroscientist
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ToursExplore Lably’s 3D toursPhelps is a past-president of the Association for Psychological Science, past-president of the Society for NeuroEconomics, past-president of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society, and a founding board member of the Society for Neuroethics. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists and American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Biography
Phelps was born in Washington DC. She attended college at Ohio Wesleyan University and earned a bachelor's degree in 1984, with a major in psychology and a minor in Philosophy. As a student athlete in track and field, Phelps was named three times as an All-America selection in the heptathlon. She has one daughter, Evangeline Grace Phelps.
Subsequently, Phelps went to Princeton University where she received a M.A. in 1986 and Ph.D. in 1989 in Psychology, working under the supervision of William Hirst and Marcia K. Johnson. After graduation she worked as a research scientist at Dartmouth Medical School, the New School of Social Research and at New York University.
Phelps joined the faculty at Harvard University in 2018. Previously she had worked at NYU obtaining the rank of Full Professor in 2004 and Yale University as an Assistant and associate professor of psychology (1992–1999).
Phelps has served on the board of directors of the APS and as the editor of the journal Emotion.
In 2026, Phelps was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
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Research
Phelps's research focuses on how our emotions affect the way brain systems function in relation to memory and learning. She aims to figure out how emotions make certain learning experiences stick with us. Her research centers around four topics: incorporating animal models of emotional learning to explain human behavior, influence of emotion on episodic memory, impact of emotion on perception, attention, and expression, and explaining social behavior, decision making, and economics using basic mechanisms of emotional learning.
In an interview with Ira Flatow of Science Friday with NPR News, Phelps explained her study on extinction of memory, and how she hopes it can be used to treat people with fearful memories (e.g., phobias, PTSD, anxiety disorders). Phelps paired colored squares and mild shocks to participants' wrist to create a fear memory. She then examined the extinction of the fear memory by incorporating extinction training (showing the colored square without shocks) to one group of participants when the memory was vulnerable, and observed that the group no longer showed signs of fear. The second group received the same extinction training but outside of the memory vulnerability window, and still expressed fear. Repeated extinction training helps remove the fearful memory.
In another study Phelps examined flashbulb memories using functional magnetic resonance imaging. She observed 24 participants as they recalled their 9/11 experiences. As participants recalled the attacks, the fMRI displayed their amygdala lighting up, showing that the amygdala associated with emotional memories.
Representative publications
- Anderson, A. K., & Phelps, E. A. (2001). Lesions of the human amygdala impair enhanced perception of emotionally salient events. Nature, 411(6835), 305–309.
- Phelps, E. A. (2006). Emotion and cognition: insights from studies of the human amygdala. Annual Review of Psychology, 57, 27–53.
- Phelps, E. A., & LeDoux, J. E. (2005). Contributions of the amygdala to emotion processing: from animal models to human behavior. Neuron, 48(2), 175–187.
- Phelps, E. A., O'Connor, K. J., Cunningham, W. A., Funayama, E. S., Gatenby, J. C., Gore, J. C., & Banaji, M. R. (2000). Performance on indirect measures of race evaluation predicts amygdala activation. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12(5), 729–738.