Our Research

EEG setup The Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience 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 do 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 postive 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.

The methods we use include high-density electrophysiology, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), structural MRI including diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and positron emission tomography (PET). We also utilize measure of peripheral autonomic and skeletal-muscular measures, along with endocrine and immune measures.

We are based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with space in the Psychology Building at 1202 W. Johnson Street, Madison, WI 53706 and in the Waisman Center, at 1500 Highland Avenue, Madison, WI 53705.