Congratulations to PhD student Lihi Cohen on publishing her paper, “Examining affective flexibility using self-organized task switching: insights into self-initiated cognitive-emotional control,” with Andrea Kiesel and Irina Monno (University of Freiburg), Rotem Menachem, and Sharon Naparstek.

The study introduces a new paradigm in which participants freely choose which task to perform on emotional faces. This allows the voluntary decision to switch to be measured separately from task performance. Across two experiments, participants tended to switch away from what had just been emotionally demanding. The paradigm opens new ways to study affective flexibility in healthy and clinical populations.

Read the paper | Data and materials on OSF

Our department hosts an exciting research conference where our team will present their work/ proposal:
(# Flexibility #Life-spane #Parent-Child)

Dafne Tavetz - How model-based reinforcement learning changes with age

Eran Khalif Josef -  Interpretation Bias, Flexibility, and Emotional Symptoms in Younger and Older Adults

Geffen Markusfeld - Affective Flexibility: A Multilevel Model Integrating Behavioral, Neural, and Ecological 

Avigail Rosenfeld-Ganzel: Parent-child flexibility and well-being: Multimodal individual and dyadic process

Dr. Sharon Naparstek will lead a session about Cognitive Aging, Depression, and Neurodegenerative Risk
Yonatan will give a talk on aging and cognitive reserve 
Geffen will present a poster about flexibility and borderline personality disorder
Dafna will present a poster with a pilot study of computational resources and efficiency in aging

We are delighted to share that Lihi Cohen has received the Charles J. Gelso Psychotherapy Research Grant 2026 from the Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy Research (APA Division 29) for the project "Using LLM to Represent and Discover Patterns of Therapist Responsiveness in Psychotherapy." The grant supports her doctoral research, supervised by Dr. Sharon Naparstek and Prof. Dana Atzil-Slonim.