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Emotion node

The primary objective of the Emotion node is to elucidate the process by which humans can use high level, voluntarily controlled cognition to modulate their emotions. In general, emotions are generated by subcortical brain networks, including limbic structures such as the amygdala, which serve as hubs in emotional neural networks spanning the brainstem and the prefrontal cortex. The research proceeds along several tracks:

The first one takes extinction of conditioned fear, i. e., the waning of fear as a result of exposures to the conditioned stimulus, in the absence of the unconditioned stimulus, as a model phenomenon of emotional regulation. Animal research suggests that inhibitory connections from the prefrontal cortex to the fear generator in the amygdala provide a driving force behind the extinction of fear. A second track uses the phenomenon of the placebo response as a model of cognitive control. The third track uses brain imaging methods in studies examining the ability of research participants to modify voluntarily their responses to emotional stimuli by instructed cognitive strategies, e.g., reappraising the meaning of the stimuli. All these tracks include attempts to relate emotion regulation to specific genetic polymorphisms. The fourth and final track involves the explicit computational modeling of prefrontal control of the amygdala in situations where prefrontal-amygdala interactions are studied by means of functional magnetic resonance brain imaging (fMRI). The goal of this subproject is to develop mid-level neural networks to model fMRI data on cognitive control.