Leah H. Somerville, PhD

Building Complex Emotions and Tuning Emotion-Guided Behavior through Adolescence

Leah Somerville, PhD, is the Grafstein Family Professor of Psychology and core faculty in the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University. She is a northern Wisconsin native who got her start conducting emotion research at the University of Wisconsin, where she completed her undergraduate studies in Psychology and received her Bachelors degree. Now Leah directs the Affective Neuroscience and Development Lab (https://andl.wjh.harvard.edu), which focuses on characterizing adolescent brain development, and the consequences of brain development on psychological functioning and well being. The lab’s work integrates behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging approaches, and has played leading roles in large-scale, national research projects such as the Human Connectome Project in Development. Leah has received several honors recognizing her work including the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, a Harvard College Professorship, early career awards from the Flux Society, Cognitive Neuroscience Society, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society, and the Everett J. Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award.

Reading List

Davidow, J.Y.*, Insel, C*, & Somerville, L.H. (2018). Adolescent development of value guided goal pursuit. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22(8), 725-736. *Equal contribution

Grisanzio, K.A., Flournoy, J.C., Mair, P., & Somerville, L.H. (2023). Shifting qualities of negative affective experience through adolescence: Age-related change and associations with functional outcomes. Emotion, 23(1), 278-288.

Insel, C., Kastman, E.K., Glenn, C.R., & Somerville, L.H. (2017). Development of corticostriatal connectivity constrains goal directed behavior through adolescence. Nature Communications, 8(1), 1605.

Nook, E.C., Sasse, S.F., Lambert, H.K., McLaughlin, K.M., & Somerville, L.H. (2018). The nonlinear development of emotion differentiation: Granular emotional experience is low in adolescence. Psychological Science, 29(8), 1346-1357. Supplement Data & Materials

Rodman, A.M., Powers, K.E., Kastman, E.K., Kabotyanski, K.E., Stark, A.M., Mair, P., & Somerville, L.H. (2023). Physical effort exertion for peer feedback reveals evolving social motivations from adolescence to young adulthood. Psychological Science, 34(1), 60-74.