Human decision making and happiness
Robb Rutledge studies the subjective feelings associated with affective states like happiness, using computational models to ask how feelings relate to events in our lives and to the decisions we make. Experiments in his lab utilize neuroimaging, pharmacology, intracranial recordings, and large-scale smartphone-based data collection in tens of thousands of people in the general and clinical populations. This approach has produced computational models relating affective states to learning processes and described a novel role for the neurotransmitter dopamine in risky decision-making. His lab builds models linking emotion and cognition and studies how these links are influenced in mood disorders.
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Biography
Rutledge received his Bachelor's degree from Caltech and PhD in Neural Science from New York University. He was a postdoc at University College London at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging before starting his lab at the Max Planck Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research and then moving in 2020 to Yale.