Matthew Jerram, PhD

Education

• PhD, Suffolk University
• MA, Suffolk University
• MLA, Johns Hopkins University
• BA, Johns Hopkins University

Internship: Brockton/West Roxbury VAMC - Harvard Medical School; Postdoctoral Fellowship: Harvard Medical School/Massachusetts Mental Health Center Clinical Research Fellowship; Two Brattle Center; Licensed Psychologist, Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Specialty Areas

Dissociation; mindfulness; emotion and emotion regulation; affective neuroscience; cognitive behavioral therapy/dialectical behavior therapy; neuropsychological assessment

My research in the Dissociation and Integration of Cognitive and Emotion (DICE) Laboratory focuses on understanding the psychological phenomenon of dissociation, broadly defined, and its relationship to emotion regulation. I am interested in understanding the affective and cognitive processes that contribute to the development and utilization of dissociation. My goal is to describe how dissociation operates as both a normative and pathological process. I am also interested in how dissociative processes are reflected in brain structure and function. I approach emotion and emotion regulation from a constructionist perspective and have focused particularly on the dimensional model of emotion that includes the dimension of “emotional dominance” (the sense of being in control or out of control in an emotional context), as this dimension is particularly important in dissociation. Research in my lab has thus far demonstrated that processing emotional dominance activates brain regions related to the salience network and the default mode network, regions that have also been implicated in dissociation. My research includes the use of cognitive, emotion and personality assessment, behavioral methods, as well as neuroimaging resources such as the Human Connectome Project and neuroimaging meta-analysis.

Publications

• Falcone, G., & Jerram, M. (2018) Brain Activity in Mindfulness Depends on Experience: A Meta-analysis of fMRI Studies, Mindfulness, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-018-0884-5">https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-018-0884-5.
• Kyte, D., Jerram, M., & DiBiase, R. (2019) Brain Opioid Theory of Social Attachment: A Review of Evidence for Approach Motivation to Harm, Motivation Science, Advance online publication. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/mot0000135.
• Karpel, M. & Jerram, M. (2015) Levels of dissociation and non-suicidal self-injury: a quartile risk model. Journal of Trauma and Dissociation, 16, 303-321.
• Jerram, M., Lee, A., Negreira, A. & Gansler, D. (2014) The neural correlates of the dominance dimension of emotion. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 221, 135-141.
• Carlson-Emerton, B., Gansler, D., Sandberg, E., & Jerram, M. (2014) Functional Anatomic Dissociation of Description and Picture Naming in the Left Temporal Lobe. Brain Imaging and Behavior, 8, 570-578.
• Goldstein, J., Jerram, M., Poldrack, R., Makris, N. (2010) Sex differences in stress response circuitry activation in the brain dependent on female hormonal cycle. Journal of Neuroscience, 30, 431-438.