“Nicole is a great example of an interdisciplinary researcher. It’s not easy to come from a very different discipline and pick up a lot of these technologies,” Fox School of Business’s Center for Applied Research in Decision Making (CARD) Director Vinod Venkatraman said of media and communications doctoral candidate Nicole Henninger. While Henninger’s degree comes from Klein College of Media and Communication, her research is through CARD, and she will be the first Klein student to hold a graduate distinction in neuroscience from the College of Liberal Arts.

Henninger’s research investigates the reasons behind a person’s decision to donate to a charity after being shown an online post. Some participants are placed in an fMRI machine, housed in the Temple University Brain Research & Imaging Center (TUBRIC), and are shown social media posts asking for donations to causes and are given a small amount of money that they can choose to donate or keep. In addition to the fMRI participants, the study has had about 200 other participants follow the same procedure on a computer. 

Henninger and her colleague Liz Beard then evaluate the brain activity from the fMRI participants or the decision-making process of the computer participants along with their donation decision in order to figure out what physical responses occur when viewing donation requests, as well as what type of posts people donate to using emotions.

“The most exciting part about it is that we really donate based on participants' decisions,” Henninger said. So far, they have donated around $400 to charities through the research, and only about 20-30% of participants keep the money they were given.

Though the COVID-19 pandemic caused a setback in their research, which started almost three years ago, Henninger and Beard have most of the results they need, and just need to interpret the data.

Henninger is grateful that Klein gives her the freedom to explore other disciplines as they relate to communication, and for the grant from the Young Scholars Interdisciplinary Forum that allowed them to be able to do the brain scans of participants. 

But how did Henninger, a Klein student, get involved with CARD and TUBRIC?

“She first came to the center and started attending some of our meetings because she was interested in some of the methods that we have access to and how she could use them from a communications discipline perspective,” Venkatraman said. “She did a lot of the learning of the methods on her own.” 

Beard, who is a graduate student in the decision neuroscience program in Fox, had experience in communications neuroscience before coming to Temple, but has still learned a great deal through her work with Nicole. Beard has done work in the Control and Adaptive Behavior Lab, where she says Henninger would often come in to present and give feedback.

“Her expertise in communications and now in communications neuroscience really helps to guide our lab in that area of research as well,” Beard said.

Beard noted Henninger’s tireless efforts to study new disciplines and how amazing she is at fostering relationships across fields. 

“It’s not really about what discipline you are from,” Venkatraman said. “It’s how you can bring ideas and skills to broadly understand the research objects.”