Mary Helen Immordino-Yang

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang (Ed.D., Harvard University), Fahmy and Donna Attallah Professor of Humanistic Psychology, is a professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience at the University of Southern California and founding director of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (candle.usc.edu). Her work pairs in-depth qualitative interviews with longitudinal brain imaging and psychophysiological recording to reveal coordinated mental, neural, and bodily processes by which adolescents and their teachers build meaning—deliberating on the abstract, systems-level, and ethical implications of complex information, social situations, and identities. Her research underscores the active role youth play in their own brain and psychosocial development through the narratives they construct, and capacities teachers cultivate to support student belonging and deep learning. She conducts her work in partnership with expert educators and diverse youth from the lowSES communities where she works. 

She writes and speaks extensively on the implications for redesigning schools around curiosity and civic reasoning to promote intellectual vibrance and thriving. She has received numerous awards for her research and impact on society, including from the AAAS, the PNAS editorial board, the AERA, APS, FABBS, IMBES, the US Army, and others. She served on the National Academies committee writing How People Learn II, as a distinguished scientist on the Aspen Institute’s National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development, and was a Spencer Foundation midcareer fellow. Elected to the National Academy of Education in 2023.

• APA Division 8 (Society for Personality & Social Psychology) presidential nominee to the 2016 Spielberger EMPathy (Emotion, Motivation and Personality) Symposium
• FABBS Foundation Early Career Impact Award, 2015
• AERA Early Career Award, 2014
• AAAS Early Career Award for Engaging the Public with Science, 2014
• Rossier Award for Mentoring Postdoctoral Fellows, 2014
• Awarded an “Honor Coin” of the United States ARMY, 2012
• Received a "Commendation" from the County of Los Angeles, 2011
• Named a "Rising Star" by the Association for Psychological Science, 2011
• Inaugural recipient of the Transforming Education through Neuroscience Award, IMBES, 2008
• Awarded the PNAS Editorial Board's Cozzarelli Prize, 2010

• Read Selected Blog Posts by Mary Helen:
• Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2015, Oct. 10) Response to, To teach grit or not to teach grit: That is the question. Invited blog post published on Education Week Teacher. http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/classroom_qa_with_larry_ferlazzo/2015/10/response_to_teach_grit_or_not_to_teach_grit_-_that_is_the_question.html  
• Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2015, March 21) Rest is not idleness in the brain: Why kids may need downtime and opportunities for reflection to develop a strong sense of self and a moral compass. The People’s Science: Creating a conversation between scientists and the public. https://thepeoplesscience.forumbee.com/t/80hv4g
• Selected Publications in Human Development and Education - See CV, candle.usc.edu for full List (*Signifies student/postdoc author at time of submission)  
• Immordino-Yang, M.H. & *Gotlieb, R. (2017, in press) Embodied brains, social minds, cultural meaning: Integrating neuroscientific and educational research on social-affective development. American Educational Research Journal, Centennial Issue.
• Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2016) Emotion, sociality, and the brain’s default mode network: Insights for educational practice and policy. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 3(2), 211-219 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2372732216656869
• *Gotlieb, R., *Hyde, E., Immordino-Yang, M.H., Kaufman, S.B. (2016) Cultivating the Social-Emotional Imagination in Gifted Education: Insights from Educational Neuroscience. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1377(1), 22-31.
• Immordino-Yang, M.H. & Christodoulou, J.C. (2014) Neuroscientific contributions to understanding and measuring emotions in educational contexts. In R. Pekrun & L. Linnenbrink-Garcia (Eds.), International Handbook of Emotions in Education. (pp.607-624) New York, NY: Taylor and Francis/Routledge
• Immordino-Yang, M.H., *Christodoulou, J., *Singh, V. (2012). Rest is not idleness: Implications of the brain’s default mode for human development and education. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(4), 352-364.
• Immordino-Yang, M.H. & Singh, V. (2011). Perspectives from social and affective neuroscience on the design of digital learning technologies. In R. Calvo & S. D'Mello (Eds.), New Perspectives on Affect and Learning Technologies. (pp.233-241) Sydney: Springer
• Immordino-Yang, M.H. & Sylvan, L. (2010). Admiration for virtue: Neuroscientific perspectives on a motivating emotion. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 35(2), 110-115.
• Immordino-Yang, M.H. & Fischer, K.W. (2010). Neuroscience bases of learning. In V.G. Aukrust (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Education, 3rd Edition. (pp.310-316) Oxford: Elsevier.
• Immordino-Yang, M.H. & Faeth, M. (2009). The role of emotion and skilled intuition in learning. (pp.66-81). In D.A. Sousa (Ed.), Mind, Brain, and Education. Bloomington, IN: Solution Tree Press.
• Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2008). The smoke around mirror neurons: Goals as sociocultural and emotional organizers of perception and action in learning. Mind, Brain, and Education, 2(2), 67-73.
• Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2007). A tale of two cases: Lessons for education from the study of two boys living with half their brains. Mind, Brain and Education, 1(2), 67-83.
• Immordino-Yang, M.H. & Damasio, A.R. (2007). We feel, therefore we learn: The relevance of affective and social neuroscience to education. Mind, Brain and Education, 1(1), 3-10. 
• Selected Publications in Psychology and Social Neuroscience – See CV for Full List (*Signifies student/postdoc author at time of submission)  
• Immordino-Yang, M.H. & *Yang, X.-F. (2017, in press) Cultural differences in the neural correlates of social-emotion experiences: An interdisciplinary, developmental perspective. Current Opinion in Psychology, Special Issue on Emotion.
• Venkatraman, A., Edlow, B. & Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2017) The brainstem in emotion: A review. Frontiers in Neuroanatomy, doi.org/10.3389/fnana.2017.00015.
• Dehghani, M., Boghrati, R., *Man, K., Hoover, J., *Gimbel, S., Vaswani, A., Immordino-Yang, M.H., Gordon, A., Damasio, A.R., Kaplan, J. (2017) Decoding the Neural Representation of Story Meanings across Languages. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
• *Yang, X.-F., Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2017). Culture and cardiac vagal tone independently influence emotional expressiveness. Culture and Brain, 5(1) 36-49. DOI 10.1007/s40167-017-0048-9
• Immordino-Yang, M.H., *Yang, X. & Damasio, H. (2016) Cultural modes of expressing emotions influence how emotions are experienced. Emotion 16(7), 1033-1039. doi: 10.1037/emo0000201
• Kaplan, J., *Gimbel, S., Dehghani, M., Immordino-Yang, M.H., Segae, K., Damasio, H., Gordon, A., & Damasio, A. (2016). Processing narratives concerning protected values: A cross-cultural investigation of neural correlates. Cerebral Cortex. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhv325
• *Saxbe, D., *Del Piero, L., Immordino-Yang, M.H., Kaplan, J., Margolin, G. (2016) Neural mediators of the intergenerational transmission of family aggression. Development and Psychopathology, 28(02), 595-606.
• *Saxbe, D., *Del Piero, L., Immordino-Yang, M.H., Kaplan, J., Margolin, G. (2015) Neural correlates of adolescents’ viewing of parents’ and peers’ emotions: Associations with risk-taking behavior and risky peer affiliations. Social Neuroscience, 10(6), 592-604.
• Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2015) Embodied brains, social minds: Toward a cultural neuroscience of social emotion. In, Chiao, J., Li, S.-C., Seligman, R., Turner, R. (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Cultural Neuroscience. Oxford: U.K.: Oxford University Press.
• Immordino-Yang, M.H., *Yang, X. & Damasio, H. (2014) Correlations between social-emotional feelings and anterior insula activity are independent from visceral states but influenced by culture. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 8:728. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00728       NOTE: From approximately 3 weeks after its release, this article has ranked in the top 5% of all published articles for attention received.  In November, 2015 this article was named a “tier-climbing” selection and a focused review paper was invited. 
• Dehghani, M., Immordino-Yang, M. H., Graham, J., Marsella, S., Forbus, K., Ginges J., Tambe, M. & Maheswaran, R. (2014). Computational Models of Moral Perception, Conflict & Elevation. Proceedings of the International Association for Computing and Philosophy.
• Sagae, K., Gordon, A. S., Dehghani, M., Metke, M., Kim, J.S., *Gimbel, S.I., *Tipper, C., Kaplan, J. & Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2013) A data-driven approach for classification of subjectivity in personal narratives. Proceedings of the 2013 Workshop on Computational Models of Narrative, 32, 198-213, OASIcs, Scholss Dagstuhl.
• Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2013). Studying the Effects of Culture by Integrating Neuroscientific with Ethnographic Approaches. Psychological Inquiry: An International Journal for the Advancement of Psychological Theory, 24(1), 42-46.
• Immordino-Yang, M.H. & *Singh, V. (2013). Hippocampal contributions to the processing of social emotions. Human Brain Mapping, 34(4), 945-955. doi: 10.1002/hbm.21485 (First published online: 2011)
• Chiao, J. & Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2013). Modularity and the cultural mind: Contributions of cultural neuroscience to cognitive theory. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(1), 56-61.
• *Yang, X., *Bossman, J., *Schiffhauer, B., *Jordan, M., Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2013). Intrinsic default mode network connectivity predicts spontaneous verbal descriptions of autobiographical memories during social processing. Frontiers in Cognitive Science, 3:592. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00592
• *Saxbe, D., *Yang, X., *Borofsky, L., Immordino-Yang, M. H. (2013). The embodiment of emotion: Language use during the feeling of social emotions predicts cortical somatosensory activity. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8, 806-812 doi: 10.1093/scan/nss075. (First published online: 2012)
• Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2010). Toward a microdevelopmental, interdisciplinary approach to social emotion. Emotion Review, 2(3), 217-220.
• Immordino-Yang, M.H., *McColl, A., Damasio, H., Damasio, A. (2009). Neural correlates of admiration and compassion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(19), 8021-8026.      NOTE: This paper received the 2010 Cozzarelli Prize from the PNAS editorial board.      Commentary:  Haidt, J. & Morris, J. (2009). Finding the self in self-transcendent emotions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(19), 7687-7688.  

Immordino-Yang's research is/has been supported by the NSF, NIH, NICHD, DARPA, the Raikes Foundation, the ECMC Foundation, the Templeton Foundation (Imagination Institute at U PENN), the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the USC Provost, the Rossier School of Education, The Brain and Creativity Institute Fund, and other sources.