
Andreas Olsson
WP II
Professor of Psychology
Department of Clinical Neuroscience
Karolinska Institutet
Dr. Andreas Olsson is an associate professor in psychology and the director of the EmotionLab at Karolinska Institutet. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology from New York University (2006) and received post-doctoral training at Columbia University. Broadly, Dr. Olsson’s research aims at understanding how emotional information is transmitted between individuals, learned and expressed in a range of social situations. He has a particular interest in how basic mechanisms of threat and safety learning together with social cognition shapes people’s memories and decisions trough interactions. His research includes measures of behavior, peripheral psychophysiology, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and computational approaches.
Selected Publications
Lindström, B., Golkar, A., Jangard, S., Tobler, P. N., & Olsson, A. (2019). Social threat learning transfers to decision making in humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(10), 4732–4737. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1810180116
Lindström, B., Jangard, S., Selbing, I., & Olsson, A. (2018). The role of a “common is moral” heuristic in the stability and change of moral norms. Journal of Experimental Psychology. General, 147(2), 228–242. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000365
Olsson, A., McMahon, K., Papenberg, G., Zaki, J., Bolger, N., & Ochsner, K. N. (2016). Vicarious Fear Learning Depends on Empathic Appraisals and Trait Empathy. Psychological Science, 27(1), 25–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797615604124
Pan, Y., Olsson, A., & Golkar, A. (2020). Social safety learning: Shared safety abolishes the recovery of learned threat. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 135, 103733. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2020.103733
Undeger, I., Visser, R. M., Becker, N., de Boer, L., Golkar, A., & Olsson, A. (2021). Model-based representational similarity analysis of blood-oxygen-level-dependent fMRI captures threat learning in social interactions. Royal Society Open Science, 8(11), 202116. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.202116