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Heather L. Urry

Contact Info Department of Psychology Tufts University Psychology Building Room 126 Medford, MA 02155 Lab Website Tel: 617-627-3733 Email Professor

Associate Professor of Psychology
Ph.D., University of Arizona, 2001

Heather L. Urry received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology in John Allen's lab at the University of Arizona. She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in affective neuroscience in Richie Davidson's lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Professor Urry established the Emotion, Brain, & Behavior Laboratory (EBBL) at Tufts University in the Fall of 2005. Research in the EBBL focuses on learning how the brain and body work together to let us experience, express, and regulate emotion. Tools include functional magnetic resonance imaging, peripheral psychophysiology (skin conductance, EKG, facial electromyography), eye tracking and pupillometry, and behavioral measures.

To learn more about the work, visit Professor Urry's lab website. To learn about research opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students (or for opportunities to participate in the research), click here.

Representative Publications

• Urry, H. L., & Gross, J. J. (2010). Emotion regulation in older age. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19, 352-357.
• Urry, H. L. (2010). Seeing, thinking, and feeling: Emotion-regulating effects of gaze-directed cognitive reappraisal. Emotion, 10, 125-135.
• Urry, H. L. (2009). Using reappraisal to regulate unpleasant emotional episodes: Goals and timing matter. Emotion, 9, 782-797.
• Urry, H. L., van Reekum, C. M., Johnstone, T., & Davidson, R. J. (2009). Individual differences in some (but not all) medial prefrontal regions reflect cognitive demand while regulating unpleasant emotion. NeuroImage, 47, 852-863.
• Johnstone, T., van Reekum, C. M., Urry, H. L., Kalin, N. H., & Davidson, R. J. (2007). Failure to regulate: Counterproductive recruitment of top-down prefrontal-subcortical circuitry in major depression. Journal of Neuroscience, 27, 8877-8884.
• van Reekum, C. M., Johnstone, T., Urry, H. L., Thurow, M. E., Schaefer, H. S., Alexander, A. L., & Davidson, R. J. (2007). Gaze fixations predict brain activation during the voluntary regulation of picture-induced negative affect. NeuroImage, 36, 1041-1055.
• Urry, H.L., van Reekum, C.M., Johnstone, T., Kalin, N.H., Thurow, M.E., Schaefer, H.S., Jackson, C.A., Frye, C.J., Greischar, L.L., Alexander, A.L., & Davidson, R.J. (2006). Amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex are inversely coupled during regulation of negative affect and predict the diurnal pattern of cortisol secretion among older adults. Journal of Neuroscience, 26, 4415-4425.
• Urry, H. L., Nitschke, J. B., Dolski, I., Jackson, D. C., Dalton, K. M., Mueller, C. J., Rosenkranz, M. A., Ryff, C. D., Singer, B. H., & Davidson, R. J. (2004). Making a life worth living: Neural correlates of well-being. Psychological Science, 15, 367-372.