How do emotional/motivational associations guide attention, action, learning and memory? Intuitively we often think of emotions as big feelings that burst out to interrupt our lives. But we are always surrounded by sights and sounds and smells and events that are associated with emotional or motivational meaning – even if these are subtle. Such associations infuse every moment and constantly direct our cognition and our action. Even without thinking about it we perceive, attend, learn, think about, remember, and make decisions based on emotional relevance. This can be useful from day to day in guiding us to what's important without us having to spend too much conscious effort and thought, but it can also create problems after traumatic experience or in anxiety and depression. In this talk I present findings from two research themes: The first theme of basic research focuses on neurocognitive processes by which emotional experience tunes the nervous system to guide cognition and action. The second theme of collaborative translational research focuses on approach of reward and avoidance of punishment in mood disorders.
Readings:
B. J. Forys et al., “Gender impacts the relationship between mood disorder symptoms and effortful avoidance performance,” eNeuro, 30 Jan 2023: https://europepmc.org/article/med/36717265
J. H. Kryklywy et al., “Lateralization of Autonomic Output in Response to Limb-Specific Threat,” eNeuro 26 August 2022: https://www.eneuro.org/content/9/5/ENEURO.0011-22.2022.abstract
J. H. Kryklywy et al., “Decomposing Neural Representational Patterns of Discriminatory and Hedonic Information during Somatosensory Stimulation,” eNeuro 22 December 2022: https://www.eneuro.org/content/10/1/ENEURO.0274-22.2022.abstract
