Upcoming Events
May 8: Joseph LeDoux will discuss "Fearful brains in an anxious world" at the Center for Neuroscience Lecture Series at 4 pm in Room 1111, Biotechnology/Genetics Center on the UW-Madison campus.
May 8-9: Richard Davidson will be speaking at the Happiness & Its Causes forum in Sydney, Australia.
May 13: Appleton Education Foundation's "Brain to Five" series will wrap up with Dr. Davidson's presentation of "Shaping Your Child's Brain" at 7 p.m. at Appleton East High School.
May 28-31: The PNIRS annual conference, Promoting Innovation in PsychoNeuroImmunology: From Cytokines to Society will take place in Madison.
Research in the News
Dan Rather Reports: Antoine Lutz, Andy Frances and Richie Davidson appear on the first ~20 minutes of the recent HDNet program, Mind Science.
Two recent lab publications - "Regulation of the neural circuitry of emotion by compassion meditation: Effects of meditative expertise" and "Attention regulation and monitoring in meditation" - are creating a buzz.
The first has been mentioned in US News & World Reports, Scientific American, Newsweek, LiveScience, WebMD, CTV, BBC Online and others, including a CNN video. The second has just been published as the cover article in Trends in Cognitive Science.
The research was led by Antoine Lutz.
Dr. Davidson's research is featured in the March 2008 Oprah Magazine article "This is Your Brain on Happiness."
ABC News talks with Dr. Davidson about the Science of Happiness.
The Heart-Brain Connection: The Neuroscience of Social, Emotional, and Academic Learning, a talk given by Dr. Davidson, is now online at The George Lucas Educational Foundation's www.edutopia.org.
What We Do
The Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is engaged in a broad program of research on the brain mechanisms that underlie emotion and emotion regulation in normal individuals throughout the life course, and in individuals with various psychiatric disorders. The populations we study include normal middle-aged and older adults, infants, toddlers, children and adolescents.
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? And 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.