HANNAH RAILA, PH.D.
Assistant Teaching Professor
Emotion, Cognition & Psychopathology Lab
UC Santa Cruz | Department of Psychology

I am an Assistant Teaching Professor at UC Santa Cruz. I also hold an adjunct faculty appointment at Stanford University School of Medicine. Originally from outside of Boston, I earned my B.A. in Psychology from Dartmouth College and my Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Yale University.

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My research asks questions about connections between emotion (e.g., how happy we are) and cognition (e.g., what we pay attention to) in the context of psychopathology.

 

I’ve been particularly interested in the “diet” of visual information that we consume as we navigate the world (e.g., do we see the crack in the wall, or do we pass by it unaware), the factors that predispose us to detect this emotional information in our environment in the first place, and how this diet of information influences our emotions. To study our visual biases and how they relate to how we feel, I leverage tools from cognitive psychology – including eye tracking, virtual reality (VR), and continuous flash suppression (CFS). Most recently, I developed a novel VR treatment for hoarding disorder, which directly connects our visual world to psychopathology.

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In my free time, I enjoy travel (I've been lucky to visit over 60 countries), track workouts (I ran track through college, but I'm pretty slow these days!), and catching up with friends.