Welcome
The Integrated Brain and Behavior Research Center
Brain and behavior research at the University of Haifa holds a unique flavor budding from its close association with the fields of neuroscience and psychology, education and learning disabilities. The Integrated Brain and Behavior Research Center (IBBRC) at Haifa University was established with the aim of assembling brain and behavior research activity across faculties, departments and disciplines. (for list of members press here)
IBBRC aims to promote collaboration among its members, and to enhance national and international research cooperation with leading centers around the world.
Towards that end, the IBBRC organizes bi-annually an international Brain and Behavior meeting at the University of Haifa (see Bi-Annual Meetings).
A parallel aim is to promote Brain and Behavior research students. The IBBRC students participate in its various activities and are given an annual assignment to organize an international symposium on Brain and Behavior research.
Director - Prof.Simone Shamay Tsoory
- My research focuses on the neural basis of emotions and social behavior: How do we understand emotions? what are the neural underpinnings of empathy, social communication and interpersonal synchronization?
- We also study: The role of Oxytocin in social behavior | The neural underpinnings of social comparison and jealousy | The neural underpinnings of social touch | Chemical social communication using odor.
Founder and Vice director - Prof.Gal Richter Levin
The Brain and Behavior Laboratory
Research in the laboratory focuses on the understanding of the neurobiology of stress-related disorders, particularly Post-traumatic stress disorder and stress-induced depression, and the effects of stressful experiences in early life on cognitive and emotional abilities in adulthood.
Vice Director - Prof. Tomer Schechner
The primary research focus of my lab is on the development of anxiety disorders. By using a multiple level analysis approach, we study the biological, cognitive, behavioral and environmental factors that contribute to the etiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders. We use psychological, physiological and neuroscientific measures to better understand how these factors differentiate between the development of normative fear and pathological anxiety. We focus on information processing and more specifically on different aspects of human fear learning.
Our research on fear learning extends considerable prior work showing the profound impact that early fear learning experiences exert upon a child’s functioning over time. Fear conditioning is the most common experimental paradigm used to study fear learning processes, as it provides a translational measure that can be used to study brain-behavior associations across species. In addition, fear extinction is the fundamental mechanism underpinning exposure therapy, the most common treatment for anxiety. Therefore, findings from extinction experiments are very relevant to new treatment development. Using age appropriate fear conditioning paradigms, we are currently studying fear learning and fear extinction in normative and anxious youth and adults. These studies involve a wide range of measurements from psychophysiology, neuroimaging, self-reports and behavioral observations.
