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 social cognition, executive control, and learning and memory. 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 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:

• Contextual fear retention, fear renewal, and spontaneous recovery in a fully immersive virtual reality setting (DiVE)
• Brain mechanisms of fear generalization using fMRI and behavioral studies utilizing psychophysiological markers of conditioned fear
• Neural systems and physiological indices of interoception and intuitive judgments
• Integration of social and affective information in dyadic exchanges
• The effect of approach and aviodance motivation on the encoding and retrieval of spatial memory using a virtual water maze
• The neural circuitry mediating the effects of negative reinforcement on motivated learning using fMRI
• The effect of induced stress and moods on learning and decision-making
• Differences over the lifespan in risky decision making
• 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
• The role of emotion regulation in memory formation and its breakdown in affective disorders
• Emotion-cognition interactions in posttraumatic stress disorder
• Impact of anxiety on time perception
• Multivariate representation of emotional states