Assistant Professor
Ph.D. 
Area: Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience

Contact Information

Email: prestos@umich.edu
Psychology Office: 3040 East Hall
Psychology Phone: 734-764-5264

Research and Teaching Interests

Research in my laboratory uses an interdisciplinary approach to study the interface between emotion and decision making. There are currently two main lines of research:

• How do people process the emotions of others and how does this affect the type and amount of help they offer?
• How do people make decisions about allocating resources like food, money, and material goods?

In both of these lines, we try to determine the proximate (what the brain and body are doing) and ultimate (why they exist, how they evolved) bases of the complex behaviors. In order to do this, we have to use a variety of methods including measuring overt behavior (via computer responses or video coding), personality (via scales or questionnaires), emotion (via self-report and psychophysiology) and brain activity (via PET and fMRI).

Representative Publications

• Preston, S. D.; Buchanan, T. W.; Stansfield, R. B.; Bechara, A. (2007). Effects of anticipatory stress on decision making in a gambling task. Behavioral Neuroscience, 121(2), 257-263.
• Preston, S. D.; Bechara, A.; Grabowski, T. J.; Damasio, H.; Damasio A. R. (2007). The neural substrates of cognitive empathy. Social Neuroscience, 2 (3-4), 254-275.
• Preston, S. D. and Jacobs, L. F. (2005). Cache decision making: The effects of competition on cache decisions in Merriam’s kangaroo rat (Dipodomys merriami). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 119(2), 187-196.
• Preston, S. D. and de Waal, F. B. M. (2002). Empathy: Its ultimate and proximate bases. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25(1), 1-71.
• Preston, S.D. and Jacobs, L.J. (2001). Conspecific pilferage but not presence affects cache strategy in Merriam's kangaroo rats (Dipodomys merriami). Behavioral Ecology, 12(5): 517-523.
• Aureli, F.; Preston, S. D.; de Waal, F. B. M. (1999). Heart rate responses to social interactions in free-moving rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta): A pilot study. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 113:59-65.
• Insel, T.R.; Preston, S.; Winslow, J.T. (1995). Mating in the monogamous vole: Behavioral consequences. Physiology and Behavior, 57(4): 615-627.

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