Dr. Yoann Stussi
Senior Researcher
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Institution : University of Geneva
Department : Department of Psychology
Discipline : Psychology
Research field : Emotion, reinforcement learning, affective value, information-seeking, decision-making
PI : D. Sander & M. Lebreton
Thesis topic : Relevance detection as a psychological determinant of emotional learning
General Information
I studied cognitive and affective psychology at the University of Geneva, where I obtained a Ph.D. in psychology under the supervision of Prof. David Sander and Prof. Gilles Pourtois. I then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University in Prof. Elizabeth Phelps' lab. I returned to the University of Geneva as a postdoctoral researcher to pursue my research in affective sciences. I am now a senior researcher at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences and the Department of Psychology, University of Geneva, and affiliated with the Paris School of Economics.
My research focuses on the links between emotion, learning, information-seeking, and decision-making. I aim at better understanding why humans preferentially learn to attribute or update affective value to specific information through the investigation of the psychological, computational, and neural mechanisms underlying these learning biases and their influence on behavior. To that end, I use theoretical approaches derived from affective science in combination with experimental learning paradigms–such as Pavlovian conditioning–and behavioral, psychophysiological, brain imaging, and reinforcement-learning methods.