Steven Greening

Prior to moving to the University of Manitoba, I was an assistant professor of Cognitive and Brain Sciences in the Department of Psychology at Louisiana State University for 5 years. Prior to beginning as a faculty member, I completed my undergraduate degree in Kinesiology with a major in Psychology at the University of Toronto, a PhD with a neuroscience focus from Western University, and I completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Southern California in the Davis School of Gerontology and the Department of Psychology.

• PhD, University of Western Ontario, 2013
• BPHE (Kinesiology and psychology), University of Toronto, 2008

Research summary

My research is focused on uncovering the neural and cognitive mechanisms involved in controlling (e.g. via attention selection or mental imagery) and adapting to emotional stimuli (e.g. fear conditioned stimuli, facial expressions). It also aims to understand how emotions influence other cognitive processes like attention, decision-making and memory. I employ a range of methods including functional magnetic resonance imaging and diffusion tensor imaging, psychophysiology (e.g. skin conductance response, pupillometry) associative learning (e.g. fear conditioning) and behavioral testing.

• Burleigh, L., Jiang, X., Greening, S.G. (2022). "Fear in the theater of the mind: Mental imagery of conditioned stimuli undergo the acquisition and generalization of differential fear conditioning". Psychological Science. 33 (9), 1423-1439
• Greening, S.G., Lee, T.H., Burleigh, L., Grégoire, L., Robinson, T., Jiang, X., Mather, M., Kaplan, J. (2022). "Mental imagery can generate and regulate acquired differential fear conditioned reactivity." Scientific Reports. 12: 997.
• Jiang, X., Greening, S. G. (2021).  "Psychophysiological Evidence for Fear Extinction Learning via Mental Imagery". Psychophysiology.
• Grégoire, L., Greening, S.G. (2019). "Fear of the known: Semantic generalization of fear conditioning across languages in bilinguals". Cognition and Emotion.
• Grégoire, L., Greening, S.G. (2019). "Opening the reconsolidation window using the mind's eye: Extinction training during reconsolidation disrupts fear memory expression following mental imagery reactivation". Cognition. 183: 277-281.
• Lee, T.H., Greening, S.G., Ueno, T., Ponzio, A., Clewett, D., Sakaki, M., Mather, M. (2018). "Arousal is associated with greater neural gain in younger adults but not in older adults". Nature: Human Behavior. 2: 356-366.
• Greening, S.G., Mitchell, D.G.V., Smith, F.W. (2018). "Spatially generalizable representations of facial expressions: Decoding across partial face samples." Cortex. 101:31-43.
• Greening, S.G., Mitchell, D.G.V. (2015). "A network of amygdala connections predict individual differences in trait anxiety". Human Brain Mapping. 36(12): 4819-30.
• Greening, S.G., Osuch, E., Williamson, P.C., Mitchell, D.G.V. (2014). "The neural correlates of regulating positive and negative emotions in medication-free major depression". Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. 9(5):628-37.
• Greening, S.G., Finger, E.C., Mitchell, D.G.V. (2011). "Parsing decision making processes in prefrontal cortex: Response inhibition, overcoming learned avoidance, and reversal learning". NeuroImage. 54(2): 1432-41.
• Amting, J.M.*, Greening, S.G.*, Mitchell, DGV (2010). "Multiple mechanisms of consciousness: The neural correlates of emotional awareness". Journal of Neuroscience. 30(30): 10039-47. *Co-first authors