Elaine Fox is a psychologist and neuroscientist who has researched widely on the science of emotions. She grew up in the 1970s in Dublin and has worked at St James Hospital Dublin, University College Dublin, Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and has been a visiting senior scientist at the MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge.
Elaine is currently an Honorary Affiliate of the Calleva Centre for Evolution and Human Sciences, Magdalen College, Oxford and Director of the Affective Neuroscience Laboratory in the Department of Psychology at the University of Essex, where she leads a program of research combining cognitive psychology, neuroimaging, and genetics. She has been Head of the Department of Psychology at the University of Essex and an associate editor of leading scientific journals including Emotion and Cognition & Emotion. Her work has been discussed in Nature, Science, New Scientist, The Economist, and the New York Times. A Fellow of the Association of Psychological Science (APS), she divides her time between Wivenhoe and Oxford in England.
Elaine has published widely on the scientific aspects of fear and optimism, and her work, which has appeared in many leading scientific journals, has been summarized in an academic book Emotion Science: Neuroscientific and Cognitive Approaches to Understanding Human Emotions (published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2008).
Her scientific discoveries on the genetic aspects of optimism have been discussed widely across the national media, and led to her appearance in an ABC documentary presented by Michael J. Fox (no relation) entitled The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist, as well as the writing of her first commercial project, RAINY BRAIN, SUNNY BRAIN.
