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Sarah Dembling, M.S.

Pronouns: Sarah, she, her

Doctoral Student

SDSU / UC San Diego Joint Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology
Neuropsychology

San Diego

Accounts

Areas of Research

Neurobiology of Social Connection, Physical and Mental Health, Multimodal Methods, Neuroimaging, Behavioral Assessment, Physiological Measures

Bio

I am broadly interested in the study of bodily feedback to psychological responses. This includes understanding how interoception—the ability to sense internal body signals—relates to affective experiences (e.g., anxiety and depression) and how the brain and body’s reward system contributes to feelings of social connectedness. To explore these types of topics, I use methods including neuroimaging, behavioral assessment, and physiological measures.

Mentors

Tristen Inagaki, Ph.D., SDSU

Details

Education
  1. B.S. Neuroscience
    Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania
Publications
  1. Dembling, S. J.*, & Inagaki, T. K.* (2025). Gaining while giving: Why support-giving benefits health. In C. Stern (Ed.), Handbook of Experimental Social Psychology (pp. 42–58). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035310661.00009
  2. Dembling, S. J., Abaya, N. M., Gianaros, P. J., & Inagaki. T. K. (2025). The heart of social pain: Examining resting blood pressure and neural sensitivity to rejection. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 20(1), nsaf025. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsaf025
  3. Cruz-Vespa, I., Dembling, S. J., Han, B. H., & Inagaki, T. K. (2024) Associations between vicarious racism and psychoactive substance use depend on strength of ethnic identity. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 17217. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-67202-7
  4. Ma, Z., Reich, D.S., Dembling, S., Duyn, J. H., & Koretsky, A. P. (2021). Outlier detection in multimodal MRI identifies rare individual phenotypes among more than 15,000 brains. Human Brain Mapping, 43(5), 1766-1782. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.25756
  5. Petrus, E., Dembling, S., Usdin, T. B., Isaac, J. T.R., & Koretsky, A. P. (2020). Circuit specific plasticity of callosal inputs underlies cortical takeover. The Journal of Neuroscience, 40(40), 7714-7723. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1056-20.2020