Biography

Philip A. Gable, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of Delaware. He serves as the director of the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Graduate (ING) program.

His program of research investigates the interplay of emotion, motivation, personality and cognition. He is interested in investigating the ways emotions modulate thoughts, motivate behaviors and are expressed in the brain.

A large body of Gable's research has focused on the influence of positive and negative affects varying in motivational direction and motivational intensity on attention, time perception, emotion regulation and substance use. He examines these psychological processes using electroencephalography (EEG) measures such as hemispheric asymmetry, pre-motor activity, time-frequency, phase analyses and event-related potentials (ERP). In addition, he uses repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to investigate cortical substrates of motivation. Utilizing these psychological and psychophysiological methods provides a more complete understanding of the role of motivational processes. From these investigations, he has developed the motivational dimensional model of cognitive scope, proposing that motivational direction and intensity influence cognitive and perceptual scope.

His work focuses on identifying the critical role of motivational processes in daily life and mental health. A focus of his research is understanding substance abuse recovery to give us insight into the neural, motivational and cognitive signatures of those recovering from substance use disorder.

Research Area

Social psychology, clinical psychology, neuroscience