Other news
Congratulations to Drs. Dan Kelley and Melissa Rosenkranz, who recently defended their dissertations. Dr. Kelley will be continuing his medical school coursework for an MD/PhD degree. Dr. Rosenkranz will be pursuing post-doctoral research with our lab.
New Studies
Effects of meditation on the perception and regulation of pain
Research in the News
Dr. Davidson spoke recently on Peace Talks Radio about the neuroscience of compassion.
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.
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.