Makaela Weeda

I am fascinated by how humans share the emotions of others, and how that capacity shapes behavior – driving actions that can be altruistic, self-serving, or, in some cases, harmful. My PhD project in the Social Brain Lab builds on prior work investigating emotional contagion – the process by which individuals adopt another’s affective state – to examine harm aversion – a prosocial behavior motivated by an innate drive to avoid causing harm to others.

Using optical engram tagging and anatomical tracing approaches, I aim to identify the neural populations underlying harm aversion at the cellular level and map their connectivity throughout the brain on the circuit level. After characterizing these harm-aversion and emotional-contagion engrams, I will selectively manipulate their activity using optogenetics to assess their role in driving prosocial behavior. In parallel, we will employ fiber photometry to capture real-time neural dynamics to understand how the brain encodes, learns, and ultimately decides to prevent harm to others.