Department of Psychology

William A. Cunningham

Wil completed both his B.A. and M.A. with John Nezlek and Peter Derks at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg VA, and his Ph.D. in social psychology with Mahzarin Banaji and Marcia Johnson at Yale University in 2003. Afterward, he worked as a postdoctoral associate with Marcia Johnson in the field of cognitive neuroscience. Between 2004 and 2006, he was a faculty member at the University of Toronto and an associate scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. Wil is currently an assistant professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.

Wil’s research takes a social cognitive neuroscience approach to understand the cognitive and motivational processes underlying emotional responses. Of primary interest are the affective evaluations of people and objects that guide thought and behavior. To better understand these processes, his lab uses methods and theories from both social psychology (e.g., models of attitudes and latency-based evaluation measures) and cognitive neuroscience (e.g., biological models of emotion and fMRI/EEG methods). By using the “toolboxes” of each discipline with their distinct strengths and weaknesses, a more complete picture of emotion is likely to emerge. Current research examines how motivation and emotion-regulation (which can occur at both automatic and controlled levels of processing) contribute to emotional and evaluative states. This work suggests that evaluative states are constructed moment to moment from multiple component processes that integrate relevant information from various sources such as automatically activated attitudes and situational contexts. In addition, recent work examines how different discrete emotions contribute to evaluative judgments. For example, how do dislike and hatred differ in terms of experience, processing and behavioral outcomes? With his students and collaborators, he has applied his work to the study of prejudice (and prejudice reduction), political attitudes, development (emotional regulation in children), as well as conduct disorder, impulsivity, and is in the process of expanding the research program to study anxiety and depression (all of which are disorders in which evaluative processing and emotional regulation seem to provide non-optimal outputs).