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Research
Professor Isaacowitz's research focuses on the interplay between cognitive processes, particularly visual attention, and emotion throughout adulthood and old age. He uses eye-tracking technology to study attentional biases that may facilitate individual and age differences in emotional regulation. Eye-tracking is used as the primary means of quantifying visual attention.
Having your eyes tracked is a noninvasive and unique experience. The process involves watching a series of images on a computer monitor while a camera records the location and movements of your eyes. A lightweight head sensor unit is worn 
(the unit is like a Velcro headband) to relay the location of the participant's head in three-dimensional space to the camera. The photograph below displays the typical setup for a participant in an eye-tracking experiment.
There appear to be meaningful differences between individuals with different personality profiles and between individuals of different ages in happiness and well-being. For example, optimistic individuals appear happier than their more pessimistic peers, whereas older individuals have been shown in recent research to show surprisingly high levels of well-being compared to their younger counterparts.
Professor Isaacowitz's primary research interest involves investigating the psychological mechanisms underlying these individual and age differences.In particular, he is interested in the role of attention in the processing of emotional information, and how preferences and biases in emotional processing can produce differences in affect and well-being.
Current projects are exploring the individual and age differences in attention to stimuli of positive and negative emotional valence, as well as the effects of such biases on health-relevant memory and behavior.