Upcoming Events
December 8, 2009 in Bethesda, MD: NCCAM's 10th Anniversary Research Symposium: Exploring the Science of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Richard Davidson will speak during the afternoon session on Mind-Body Medicine at this signature event.
April 21-22, 2010 Wisconsin Symposium on Emotion
Announcing the new Center for Investigating Healthy Minds website!
New Studies
Research in the News
November 13: University Communications: Can Meditation Sharpen our Attention?
October 20: The Baltimore Sun, Seeking education that reconnects minds and hearts
October 7: Calgary Herald, Meditation influences brain function
What We Do
The Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience engages in a broad program of research on the brain mechanisms underlying emotion and emotion regulation in normal individuals throughout the life course. The populations we study include normal middle-aged and older adults, infants, toddlers, children and adolescents as well as individuals with various psychiatric disorders.
We also study relations between the central circuitry of emotion and peripheral biology to probe the mechanisms of mind-brain-body interaction. A fundamental part of most of our research is a focus on individual differences in affective style - how and why individuals differ dramatically in how they respond to emotional challenges.
We are interested in both risk and resilience - why are some individuals particularly vulnerable in response to negative life events, while others appear to be relatively resilient? How can we promote enhanced resilience? As a part of the latter work, we study interventions designed to cultivate more positive affective styles. One such intervention that we have extensively studied over the past decade is meditation.
In addition to the research on normal affective function, we also study a range of psychopathologies, all of which involve abnormalities in different aspects of emotion processing. Included among the disorders we have recently studied are adult mood and anxiety disorders, and autism, fragile X and Williams syndrome in children. Some of our current research involves:
- Voluntary and automatic emotion regulation.
- Resilience in aging.
- Interactions between emotion and cognitive function, particularly working memory and attention.
- Temperament in children, in hopes of determining early signs of vulnerability to psychopathology.
- Social and emotional processing differences in children and adults with autism and fragile X.
- Mood and anxiety disorders.
- The impact of pharmaco-therapy and psychotherapy on brain function in patients with mood and anxiety disorders.
- The effects of meditation on brain function in adept practitioners and novices.
- Relations between neural mechanisms of emotion and peripheral measures of inflammation and lung function in asthma.
We are located at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and conduct research in a number of locations across campus, including the Department of Psychology, the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, and the Health Emotions Research Institute.