Research in this laboratory focuses on understanding how emotional events modulate cognitive processes in the human brain. We aim to identify brain regions that encode the emotional properties of sensory stimuli, and to show how these regions interact with neural systems supporting attention, executive control, and memory functions. To achieve this goal, we use a variety of cognitive neuroscience techniques in human subject populations. These include psychophysiological monitoring, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and behavioral studies in healthy adults as well as neurologic and psychiatric patients. This integrative approach capitalizes on recent advances in the field and may lead to new insights into cognitive-emotional interactions in the brain.

The lab is currently working on or completing the following projects:

• Test the effect of vicariously winning or losing a dominance contest on teststerone and cortisol responses in men and women (we used the 2008 US presidential election as a contest plan to conduct similar experiments in athletic contests)

  Listen to Steven Stanton's NPR interview aired on Oct. 28, 09

• Contextual fear retention, fear renewal, and spontaneous recovery in a fully immersive virtual reality setting (DiVE)
• How early life stress interacts with fear relapse processes later in adulthood in rodents
• How learned fear becomes generalized to objects and situations that were previously neutral but have gained fear-relevance via a similarity to a fear conditioned stimulus
• Investigate the brain mechanisms of fear generalization in humans using fMRI and lab based behavioral studies utilizing psychophysiological markers of conditioned fear (e.g. skin conductance response)
• Test the effect of approach and aviodance motivation on the encoding and retrieval of spatical memory using a modified virtual version of the classic water maze
• Investigate the neural circuitry mediating the effects of negative reinforcement on motivated learning using fMRI
• Explore the effect of induced postive and negative moods on participants' willingness to take financial risks
• Examine differences over the lifespan in risky decision making, this project will provide behavioral and fMRI data
• We seek to find biological predictors of risky-decision making by examining the effects of dopamine and serotonin genetics and testosterone and cortisol
• Exploring the impact of cognitive control mechanisms on learning and memory by understanding whether affective and neutral memories are susceptible to similar executive control processes, and how these memories can be either enhanced or suppressed