Arkadiy Maksimovskiy

Background

I grew up in Russia, and later in the Bronx. I am the first in my family to pursue academia, guided by mentors who encouraged me to follow my curiosity. I began college in photography and film, fascinated by how a designed environment (a film set) can tell a meaningful story. A few psychology classes later, I switched: psychology let me build environments (experiments) not just to tell stories, but to discover them. My research began with reward in excess, studying addiction during a PhD at Boston University and a NIDA fellowship at McLean Hospital, and now centers on its absence: an NIMH K01 asking whether mirth restores positive memory in depression. At UH Mānoa, I am excited to extend this work and help students find questions they care about and the tools to answer them.

Education

• PhD, Behavioral Neuroscience, Boston University, 2017
• BA, Psychology, Cornell University, 2007

Courses

• PSY 212: Survey of Research Methods

Research

I am launching the POEM Lab (Positive Emotion Mechanisms) to study how good feelings are built, and why they are harder to induce in the lab than unpleasant ones. Graphic injury distresses nearly everyone, yet a song that thrills one listener leaves the next cold. The usual answer, that positive experience depends more on context, culture, and the person, only renames the puzzle: what makes one thing delightful and another flat? I pursue this and related questions by inducing positive states, especially mirth (the feeling behind laughter), and reading them out with behavioral, computational, and neural measures (e.g., EEG). My goal is to learn what makes a specific person feel good, and how that knowledge might help people who have lost the capacity for pleasure.