I am also interested in the neural substrates of emotional experience and the neural basis of individual differences in the experience and expression of emotion. A better understanding of the functional neuroanatomy of emotion will ultimately extend understanding in a variety of contexts, including the motivational basis of behavior, cognition-emotion interactions, the neural basis of psychiatric disorders and the mechanisms by which emotional stress affects the etiology, onset and course of physical diseases. A major goal is to determine whether different emotions are mediated by fundamentally distinct neural circuitry or whether they are generated through a dimensional architecture. Findings to date support a dimensional perspective. In future imaging studies we will experimentally manipulate emotional valence, arousal and their interaction through the use of affective pictures in conjunction with autonomic and somatomotor validation measures.
Emotional responses can occur in the absence of conscious experience.
Based on the principle that selective attention activates brain areas specialized for a particular function, we have developed a paradigm in which subjects view affective pictures and attend either to their subjective emotional experience or the spatial location of the depicted scene. We demonstrated in a PET study that attention to subjective emotional responses activates the medial prefrontal cortex. This finding was replicated and extended in an fMRI study here at the University of Arizona. A second paradigm currently under development involves presenting affective pictures for very brief durations in conjunction with backward masking for the purpose of comparing emotional responses with and without conscious emotional experiences. Individual differences in the neural substrates of emotion information processing.