Berkeley Scientific Journal

Can erasing memories become a realistic and practical solution for victims plagued by traumatic memories?

Professor Eduardo Andrade received his Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Florida in 2004 before coming to theHaas School of Business. He studies the impact of emotions on consumer decision making. One of his studies publishedin 2009 shifted the concept of emotions from transient effects to long-term processes and his recent work is movinginto the burgeoning field of decision neuroscience, which uses neuroscience tools to study economic decision-making.When Berkeley Scientific Journal spoke with him in 2010, this latest project was only starting, but we were able to discusshis research in emotional judgment and marketing.

Professor Robert Levenson received his bachelors in psychologyfrom Georgetown University and subsequently received his masters and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Vanderbilt University in 1974. He has been a professor at Cal since 1986 and has published on the physiological, cultural, and psyhiological components of emotion and marriage. He is the director of the Berkeley Psychophysiology Lab and sat down with Berkeley Scientific Journal to discuss his research on emotions, specifically how they can affect our daily lives and how they are affected by neurodegenerative disorders.

The island of Mo’orea in French Polynesiafunctions as a model system to study the biologicaland ecological concept of niche differentiation,whereby two or more species are forced into differenthabitats so as to avoid competition with each other.In the waters surrounding this island, two speciesof sea urchin within the genus Echinometra livein distinctly different habitats. Previous studiesdocument Echinometra sp. A located exclusivelyon the fringing reef and Echinometra mathaeilocated exclusively on the barrier reef. This studyinvestigated three short-term factors (availablespace, nutrient supply, and predation) that mightbe influencing this spatial distribution. None ofthese factors appear to be causing the separation ofE. sp. A and E. mathaei. In fact, they all support thedistributional findings of this study that showednon-mutually exclusive distribution data on the tworeef types.