Christopher Sears, PhD

PhD, University of Western Ontario, 1996
MA, University of Western Ontario, 1991
BA (Hons), University of New Brunswick, 1989
Christopher Sears

Areas of Research

Cognition, Emotion, Memory, Attention, Depression, Depression Vulnerability, Body Image

Supervising degrees

Psychology - Masters: Unavailable
Psychology - Doctoral: Unavailable

Working with this supervisor

Why do people process emotional information differently? Are there individual differences in how emotional information is attended to and remembered that increase vulnerability to mood disorders? Are there individual differences that reduce vulnerability? How can cognition researchers distinguish between typical and atypical attention and memory for emotional information? Our research seeks to answer these and related questions.

My team of graduate and undergraduate trainees combines eye-gaze tracking paradigms, mood induction procedures, and memory tests to investigate how mood influences selective attention to emotional stimuli and their subsequent encoding and retrieval (e.g., Fernandez, Quigley, Dobson, & Sears, 2025). Many of our studies have examined attention and memory for emotional information in individuals with depression and those vulnerable to depression (e.g., Quigley, Russell, Yung, Dobson, & Sears, 2025), with the goal of distinguishing typical from atypical patterns of emotional processing (e.g., Quigley, Russell, Yung, Dobson, & Sears, 2025). Visit the Cognition and Emotion Lab website to learn more about our research.

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