About

Elizabeth A. Phelps is the Pershing Square Professor of Human Neuroscience at Harvard University. She is the director of the Phelps Lab, which is part of the Harvard Department of Psychology. Her contact information includes her email phelps@fas.harvard.edu, and her office is located at the Northwest Lab Building, 52 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, Office #295.10, with phone number 617-496-1128. The lab focuses on research related to human neuroscience, and she is involved in mentoring post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, lab managers, visiting fellows, and research assistants. Her work emphasizes understanding the neural mechanisms underlying human cognition and emotion, contributing significantly to the field of neuroscience.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Neuroscience
• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Psychiatry
• Cognitive science

Selected publications

• Exerting effort for non-instrumental information under risk

  Scientific Reports · 2026-03-29

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  People constantly invest effort to seek information in everyday life, even if the information is of no instrumental value for the decision at hand. However, the mechanism underlying people’s willingness to exert effort in exchange for information remains unclear. Previous work has suggested that desirability and uncertainty are two key factors influencing information-seeking, but few studies have tested if these factors are important when exerting physical effort in exchange for information. Additionally, it remains unknown whether different kinds of uncertainty, i.e., risk and ambiguity, have differential impacts. In the current study, we developed a novel information-seeking task to quantify the value of non-instrumental information using incentive-compatible physical effort to examine how effort changes as a function of desirability and uncertainty. Across two studies (N = 123), we found that people’s willingness to exert effort is positively associated with outcome expected value under both risk and ambiguity. Additionally, people exert more effort when outcome distribution uncertainty increases in risky situations, but are insensitive to ambiguity, except when facing extreme ambiguity. Our results demonstrate an unexpected dissociation. Humans will engage in effort-based information-seeking, even for non-instrumental information, when facing risk. In contrast, they show a much lower willingness to expend effort to resolve non-instrumental ambiguity.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Socioeconomic Status, Emotion Regulation, and Mental Health: Toward an Integrative Neurocognitive Framework

  2026-05-08

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Uncertainty mindset intervention promotes uncertainty-as-enabling beliefs and modulates directed exploration

  2026-04-30

  articleOpen access

  Uncertainty is prevalent in everyday decision-making and lies at the heart of the explore-exploit dilemma. Prior work has shown that psychological constructs related to uncertainty processing are associated with individual differences in exploration. Yet, it remains unclear whether interventions targeting beliefs about uncertainty can influence how people explore. In a randomized controlled study (total N = 862), we administered a brief ~10-min uncertainty mindset intervention designed to promote the perspective that uncertainty offers opportunities and can be actively shaped by individual action, and examined whether it influences uncertainty-driven exploration. The intervention increased uncertainty-as-enabling mindsets and improved affective and cognitive outcomes relative to a control group. Using computational models of different exploration strategies, we demonstrated that although the intervention did not uniformly increase the tendency to explore uncertain options, it strengthened the association between uncertainty-as-enabling mindsets and directed exploration. These findings suggest that a brief, easily scalable intervention can enhance the extent to which uncertainty-related beliefs guide exploratory behaviour, with broader implications for well-being and adaptive functioning under uncertainty.

  PublisherDOI

• Uncertainty mindset intervention promotes uncertainty-as-enabling beliefs and modulates directed exploration

  Open MIND · 2026-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Uncertainty is prevalent in everyday decision-making and lies at the heart of the explore-exploit dilemma. Prior work has shown that psychological constructs related to uncertainty processing are associated with individual differences in exploration. Yet, it remains unclear whether interventions targeting beliefs about uncertainty can influence how people explore. In a randomized controlled study (total N = 862), we administered a brief ~10-min uncertainty mindset intervention designed to promote the perspective that uncertainty offers opportunities and can be actively shaped by individual action, and examined whether it influences uncertainty-driven exploration. The intervention increased uncertainty-as-enabling mindsets and improved affective and cognitive outcomes relative to a control group. Using computational models of different exploration strategies, we demonstrated that although the intervention did not uniformly increase the tendency to explore uncertain options, it strengthened the association between uncertainty-as-enabling mindsets and directed exploration. These findings suggest that a brief, easily scalable intervention can enhance the extent to which uncertainty-related beliefs guide exploratory behaviour, with broader implications for well-being and adaptive functioning under uncertainty.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Uncertainty mindset intervention promotes uncertainty-as-enabling beliefs and modulates directed exploration

  2026-04-26

  articleOpen access

  Uncertainty is prevalent in everyday decision-making and lies at the heart of the explore-exploit dilemma. Prior work has shown that psychological constructs related to uncertainty processing are associated with individual differences in exploration. Yet, it remains unclear whether interventions targeting beliefs about uncertainty can influence how people explore. In a randomized controlled study (total N = 862), we administered a brief ~10-min uncertainty mindset intervention designed to promote the perspective that uncertainty offers opportunities and can be actively shaped by individual action, and examined whether it influences uncertainty-driven exploration. The intervention increased uncertainty-as-enabling mindsets and improved affective and cognitive outcomes relative to a control group. Using computational models of different exploration strategies, we demonstrated that although the intervention did not uniformly increase the tendency to explore uncertain options, it strengthened the association between uncertainty-as-enabling mindsets and directed exploration. These findings suggest that a brief, easily scalable intervention can enhance the extent to which uncertainty-related beliefs guide exploratory behaviour, with broader implications for well-being and adaptive functioning under uncertainty.

  PublisherDOI

• The influence of exposure to early-life adversity on agency-modulated reinforcement learning

  Learning & Memory · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Agency beliefs influence how humans learn from different contexts and outcomes. Research demonstrates that stressors, such as exposure to early-life adversity (ELA), are associated with both agency beliefs and learning, but how these processes interact remains unclear. The current study investigated whether exposure to ELA influences agency and interacts with reinforcement learning in adults. Replicating prior behavioral and computational work, ELA resulted in decreased learning, while increased adversity severity was associated with decreased latent agency beliefs. These findings suggest that exposure to adversity in childhood has a nuanced impact on reinforcement learning and agency beliefs in adulthood.

  PublisherDOI

• Item recognition is associated with gut microbiota composition in healthy humans

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025-04-16

  preprintOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Murine studies show that the gut microbiota, the collection of the microbes residing in the large intestine, affects memory performance in the host. However, whether commensal gut bacteria are linked to human episodic memory remains unknown. Here, we investigated whether individual differences in episodic memory performance were associated with differences in the indigenous gut microbiota composition between individuals. We show that greater gut microbiota alpha diversity was associated with better item recognition and that gut microbiota dissimilarity index (beta diversity) between participants was associated with differences in their performance. Finally, our results suggest that Prevotella copri might play a role in the relationship between gut microbiota and human item recognition in healthy individuals. In a sample size larger than previous human studies and examining unmanipulated gut microbiota, we provide evidence that episodic memory in healthy humans is linked to their gut microbiota composition.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Using natural language processing to identify patterns associated with depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic

  Journal of Affective Disorders · 2025-01-31 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 449. Introducing Precuneus as a Novel Brain Target to Improve Cognitive Function and Emotion Regulation in PTSD

  Biological Psychiatry · 2025-04-09

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Comprehensive mapping of cognitive and emotion networks in stress, anxiety, and depression implicates the precuneus as a critical hub

  Research Square · 2025-08-26

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01AG039283

  NIH · $2.1M · 2016

• NIH Grant R29MH050812

  NIH · $528k · 2000

• NIH Grant R01MH080756

  NIH · $1.9M · 2013

• NIH Grant R01MH062104

  NIH · $3.1M · 2012

• NIH Grant R21MH081088

  NIH · $421k · 2010

Frequent coauthors

• Joseph E. Dunsmoor

  The University of Texas at Austin

  58 shared

• Mahzarin R. Banaji

  Harvard University

  42 shared

• Elizabeth V. Goldfarb

  Yale University

  41 shared

• Daniela Schiller

  Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

  39 shared

• Joseph E. LeDoux

  36 shared

• Mauricio R. Delgado

  31 shared

• Vishnu P. Murty

  Temple University

  31 shared

• John C. Gore

  Vanderbilt University

  30 shared

Labs

• Phelps LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Psychology

  Princeton University

  1992

• B.A., Psychology

  University of California, Los Angeles

  1987

Awards & honors

• 21st Century Scientist Award from the James S. McDonnell Fou…
• Distinguished Scholar Award from the Social and Affective Ne…
• William James Award from the Association for Psychological S…
• Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sc…
• Fellow of the Society for Experimental Psychology