Lab Alumni

Joseph Plazak

Visiting Researcher, 2013-2014

Mary Giffen

Lab Manager, 2013-2014

Mary received her undergraduate degree in Psychology from Concordia University in 2009, and completed her Master's degree in Counselling Psychology at McGill in the spring of 2014. She is currently registered as a Provisional Psychologist in Alberta, and working in Calgary.

Sameer Sethi

UG Research Student/Research Assistant, 2012-2014

Sameer completed a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science & biology in 2014, while working actively on a project comparing how speech-like pseudoutterances and vocalizations are processed through the analysis of electrophysiological data. Sameer is now studying Medicine.

Melissa Stern

Lab Manager, 2011-2013

Melissa served as Lab Manager while undertaking her PhD in School/Applied Child Psychology at McGill. She also completed her Master's degree in the School/Applied Child Psychology program (2012) and an undergraduate degree in Psychology from McGill (2010).

Lorraine Chuen

Research Assistant, 2012-2013

Lorraine completed her undergraduate degree in Honours Psychology at McGill University. Her thesis research involved employing a cross cultural paradigm to investigate the perceptual and culturally acquired mechanisms which underly emotions induced by music. Her research interests centre around emotional processing, auditory perception and cognition, cross cultural approaches and psychophysiology. As a Research Assistant at the Pell Lab, she helped to run experiments and conduct preliminary analysis of data. She went on to do doctoral research in Ontario.

Simon Rigoulot

Postdoctoral fellow, 2010-2012

While in the lab, Simon used eye-tracking techniques to investigate cross-modal influences in the processing of auditory and visual emotional stimuli. He also developed two projects with event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to understand how the brain decodes the real intentions of speakers in ambiguous situations, like in irony, sincerity or innuendos. In 2011, Simon was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship award by McGill University (McLaughlin Fellowship, Faculty of Medicine) and his publication  “Seeing emotion with your ears: Emotional prosody implicitly guides visual attention to faces” in PLOS One was chosen to receive a McGill MedStar Award in 2012

Simon is currently a postdoctoral fellow at BRAMS working under the supervision of Dr. Jorge Armony. 

Selected publication

Rigoulot, S., & Pell, M. D. (2014). Emotion in the voice influences the way we scan emotional faces. Speech Communication, 65, 36–49.

Rigoulot, S., & Pell., M.D. (2012). Seeing emotion with your ears: Emotional prosody implicitly guides visual attention to faces. PLoS ONE, 7 (1), e30740.

Catherine Knowles

Lab Manager, 2008-2011

Catherine was a member of the Pell Lab for just under three years, working as the lab manager while completing her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and English Literature. During her time in the lab, she also assisted with behavioural research on emotion recognition across cultures and eye-tracking research on the relationship between prosody and facial expression.

Her interest in language, communication, and emotion has since brought her to a career in children's book publishing in Toronto.
 

Chinar Dara, PhD

PhD student, 2004-2010

Chinar completed her Bachelor's and M.Phil. degrees in India before joining the lab in September, 2004. While in the lab, Chinar conducted acoustic studies of the interaction between emotional prosody and phonemic tone in Punjabi, and published a study of how patients with Parkinson's disease process emotional prosody in implicit and explicit contexts. For her dissertation, Chinar completed an ambitious study of how pitch and duration contribute to the perception of discrete emotions in speech, using acoustic-perceptual, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging techniques. Chinar successfully defended her PhD thesis in December, 2010.

Chinar went on to do postdoctoral training at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institute in Baltimore, USA, working under the supervision of Dr. Argye Hillis.

Selected publications

Dara, C., Monetta, L. & Pell, M.D. (2008). Vocal emotion processing in Parkinson’s disease: reduced sensitivity to negative emotions. Brain Research, 1188, 100-111.

Pell, M.D. & Dara, C. (2007). Explicit and implicit detection of vocal emotions by adults with Parkinson’s disease. Cognitive Neuroscience Society, New York, USA.

Dara, C., Monetta, L. & Pell, M.D. (2007). Sensitivity to affective dimensions of emotional prosody in patients with Parkinson’s disease. Cognitive Neuroscience Society, New York, USA.

Abhishek Jaywant

Research Assistant, 2008-2010

While completing his Bachelor's degree in Psychology at McGill (granted in 2009), Abhi worked as a research assistant, and then conducted a fourth year research project, on how patients with Parkinson's disease are perceived by naive listeners based on changes in their voice. Abhi also participated in two projects which investigated the nature of cross-modal emotional priming effects using the Facial Affect Decision Task.  Abhi went on to pursue his doctoral degree in Clinical Psychology at Boston University.

Silke Paulmann, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow, 2007-2009

After completing her Master's degree at the University of Paderborn in 2003, Silke completed her PhD thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, leading to a Ph.D. in Cognitive Sciences from the University of Potsdam in 2006. In 2007, Silke was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship award by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in order to join the Pell Lab in November 2007. While in the lab, Silke employed event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and behavioral methodologies to investigate different aspects of emotion processing in healthy and patient populations.

Silke is currently a member of Faculty at the University of Essex, Department of Psychology, United Kingdom.

Selected publications

Paulmann, S., Pell, M.D., & Kotz, S.A. (2008). Functional contributions of the basal ganglia to emotional prosody: evidence from ERPs. Brain Research, 1217, 171-178.

Paulmann, S., Pell, M.D. & Kotz, S.A. (2008). How aging affects the recognition of emotional speech. Brain and Language, 104, 262-269.

Paulmann, S. & Kotz, S.A. (2008). An ERP investigation on the temporal dynamics of emotional prosody and emotional semantics in pseudo- and lexical sentence context. Brain and Language, 105(1), 59-69.

Rajashree Sen

Research Assistant, 2007-2008

During her time in the lab, Rajashree was completing her B.Sc. in Biochemistry at McGill. Although most interested in the "hard" sciences, Rajashree has a keen interest in psychology and language and played a central role in completing the "Hindi Study" while a member of the lab. Rajashree went on to pursue a graduate degree in Biochemistry at McGill.

Chantal Marulaz

Lab Manager, 2007-2008

Chantal came to the lab with a B.Sc. in Physiology from McGill and then completed a second undergraduate degree in Psychology while managing the lab. Chantal always had a strong interest in social and counselling psychology and was also a freelance piano teacher.

Chantal left the lab to pursue a graduate degree in Counselling Psychology in the McGill faculty of Education.

Henry Cheang, PhD

MSc Student, 1999-2001

PhD Student, 2001-2008

Henry completed a Bachelor’s degree in psychology at Concordia University (Montreal) where he investigated visual processing in children with developmental dyslexia. Henry then joined the lab in 1999 and completed an MSc thesis which sought to characterize the nature of deficits in pragmatic language and humour processing in patients with right hemisphere brain damage.

For his doctoral dissertation, Henry studied acoustic and perceptual factors which contribute to the communication of sarcasm and other attitudes in speech, and conducted cross-linguistic comparisons of these factors in English and Cantonese. During this period, Henry received a bursary from the CRIR and a three-year doctoral award from the CIHR (CIHR/K.M. Hunter Doctoral Research Award). On January 9th, 2008 Henry successfully defended his PhD dissertation entitled, "The sounds of sarcasm in English and Cantonese: a cross-linguistic production and perception study".

Henry went on to undertake post-doctoral research at the Universite de Montreal in the lab of Dr. Pierre Jolicoeur.

Selected publications

Cheang, H.S. & Pell, M.D. (2008). The sound of sarcasm. Speech Communication, 50, 366-381.

Cheang, H.S. & Pell, M.D. (2007). An acoustic investigation of Parkinsonian speech in linguistic and emotional contexts. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 20, 221-241.

Pell, M.D., Cheang, H.S., & Leonard, C.L. (2006). The impact of Parkinson’ s disease on vocal-prosodic communication from the perspective of listeners. Brain and Language, 97 (2),123-134.

Areej Alasseri, PhD

PhD student, 2001-2007

Areej came to the lab in September, 2001 with a B.A. in English Language & Literature and an M.A. in Applied Linguistics from King Saud University (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia). As well, she had completed an M.A. degree from San Jose State University, California in Speech Language Pathology and had gained work experience as a certified speech-language pathologist, including experience developing clinical evaluation and therapy materials for Arabic.

During her doctoral training program, Areej focussed her research on the nature of discourse skills in adults with aphasia and how emotional content may facilitate verbal pragmatic features of their discourse. In November, 2007 Areej successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled, "Influence of emotionality on pragmatic features of discourse produced by Arabic-speaking adults with aphasia".

Areej is now a Faculty member at the College Dar Al-Hekma in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and continues to work clinically with adults with aphasia.

Laura Monetta, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow, 2004-2007

After completing a BA and MSc in Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology at the University of San Luis, Argentina, Laura obtained a PhD in Biomedical Science (Speech-Language Pathology) at the University of Montreal in 2004. Laura then joined the lab in the spring of 2004 to pursue research which focused on pragmatic communication disorders in brain-damaged populations.

While part of the lab, Laura initiated or participated in projects looking at the study of metaphor, irony and inference comprehension in patients with Parkinson's disease, as well as studies of emotion and nonverbal processing. Laura was awarded a highly competitive postdoctoral fellowship from the CIHR Institute of Aging (2005-2007) to conduct this research.

Laura is now a member of Faculty in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology (Orthophonie) at Université Laval, Québec and continues to investigate cognitive and communication deficits in adults with Parkinson disease.

Selected publications

Monetta, L., Cheang, H.S. & Pell, M.D. (2008). Understanding speaker attitudes from prosody by adults with Parkinson's disease. Journal of Neuropsychology, 2, 415-430.

Monetta, L. & Pell, M.D. (2007). Effects of verbal working memory deficits on metaphor comprehension in patients with Parkinson's disease. Brain and Language, 101, 80-89.

Monetta, L., Ouellet-Plamondon, C.& Joanette, Y. (2004). Resource limitations as a determinant of right-hemisphere-damaged difficulties in processing alternative metaphorical meaning of words. Brain and Language, 91(1), 170-171.

Marie Desmarteau

Research Assistant, 2005-2007

Before joining the lab, Marie obtained an Undergraduate degree in Music from the University of Western Ontario and a Master's degree in Sound Recording from McGill University. She brought her background in acoustics and sound with her to the Pell lab in the spring of 2005 to work on a variety of projects including the Acoustics of Emotion and the TASIT study. While working as a research assistant in the Neuropragmatics and Emotion lab, Marie was the lab coordinator for the Child Phonology Lab of Dr. Susan Rvachew, which is part of the same department.Marie moved to Toronto to pursue a Master's in Business Administration (MBA) at the University of Toronto.

Nicole Hallonda Price

Lab Manager, 2005-2007

Before joining the lab, Nicole started a B.A. in Psychology at the University of the West Indies, in her beautiful island home of Barbados. She then transferred to Concordia University in Montreal and graduated with a B.A. Psychology Specialization degree. While at Concordia, Nicole researched obsessive-compulsive spectrum disorders in the Fear and Anxiety Laboratory.Despite her constant qualms with Canadian winters, Nicole decided to stay in Canada and acted as the Lab Manager from April 2005 to May 2007 while completing an M.A. in Counselling Psychology at McGill.Nicole currently resides and works in Toronto, Ontario.

Elmira Chan

Lab Manager, 2003-2005

Elmira came to the lab in the spring of 2003 after completing a B.A. in Psychology at Concordia University (Montreal). She then served as a research assistant and lab manager for two years during which time she completed an M.A. in Counselling Psychology at McGill. Elmira left the lab to move and work in Vancouver, British Columbia.