LOLA CUDDY (AMM, BA, Manitoba; MA, Ph. D, Toronto) is currently Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at Queenís University and Director of the Music Cognition Laboratory which she founded in 1965. Lola was President of the Society of Music Perception and Cognition in 2001 and 2002, hosting their biannual conference in 2001 at Queenís University. She continues to serve on the Scientific Advisory Board for the International Conference for the Perception and Cognition of Music and is editor of the journal Music Perception, an interdisciplinary journal publishing theoretical and empirical studies of music perception, cognition, and performance. In 2002, Lola was awarded the Frank Knox Award for Excellence in Teaching by the Queenís AMS. Her research is funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Academic Family Tree for Dr. Lola Cuddy.

LAURA-LEE BALKWILL My interests lie in the expression and recognition of emotion in music -- particularly across cultures. While doing my graduate work with William F. Thompson at York University (Toronto) we developed the Cue Redundancy Model as a theoretical framework explaining how people of one culture can recognize the intended emotion in music of another culture by attending to universal acoustic cues (Balkwill & Thompson, 1999; Balkwill, Thompson & Matsunaga, 2004). For example, in all cultures joyful music is relatively faster than slow music. This model has since been extended to emotive speech across cultures (Thompson & Balkwill, 2005). Currently, I am investigating how in-group/out-group attitudes and emotion display norms affect the recognition of emotion in speech across cultures. I am also conducting a case study of a stroke survivor with amusia. The goal is to assess whether his difficulty with pitch discrimination affects his ability to identify emotion in music or speech relative to age-matched controls.

CHRIS TRIMMER is a PhD student in the Brain, Behavior, & Cognitive Science program.
His research explores the perception of emotion in both speech and music, and how they relate to each other. He returned to Canada with a B.A in Psychology from Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Chris has been intermittently playing guitar for 10 years, and is an avid fan and connoisseur of many types of experimental music.

ASHLEY VANSTONE is a graduate student in the clinical psychology program. His research examines memory for music in Alzheimer's disease patients. In his clinical training, he is interested in issues relevant to the geriatric population. He comes to Queen's with an B.Mus. from Brandon University and a B.A. in Psychology from York University. He currently teaches a small but brilliant group of piano students at the Kingston School of Music. In his off-time he can be found cooking with mixed success and exercising with a decided lack of dedication.

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER is a fourth year honours science Psychology student at Queen's. She applied for this RA job with Dr. Cuddy not realizing that her mother had been one of Dr. Cuddy's thesis students in the 70's! Elizabeth has had 14 years of musical training on a variety of instruments, including saxophone, piano, voice and the violin. She also swing and tap dances. She is working towards going to a graduate school to pursue a path in neuropsychological imagining research.

LIANNE WONG is currently completing her Honours degree in Life Sciences at Queen's. She has been a research assistant for the music perception and cognition lab since the summer of 2006. Her background in piano performance and theory led her to work in the lab. She has had 16 years of piano training, at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto and Queen's school of music. This fall, she will begin research with the cognition and action lab at Queen's. Her interests include piano, drawing, painting, and dance!