Caleb Kealoha is a fourth-year Psychology major completing a departmental honors thesis with Dr. Matthew Lieberman. His research falls under the domain of social cognitive neuroscience, which takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the biological processes that underpin social cognition. His honors thesis project will be the first to investigate the neural processes of interpersonal conflict using an emerging neuroimaging method: functional

near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). Compared to common imaging methods, fNIRS is unique in that it can capture neural synchrony (i.e., correlates of specific brain region activity across multiple people) of person-to-person communication without preventing naturalistic features of social interaction. By way of fNIRS, Caleb’s project intends to set a reliable baseline for the verification of current conflict interventions and the development of future conflict resolution strategies. Caleb is also an avid slackliner and climber, and can often be found slacklining at Janss Steps or bouldering at the UCLA Rock Wall.