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NEUROSCIENCE AND EMOTION GROUPS:
NEUROIMAGING LAB
Dr. Mary Phillips recently moved to Pittsburgh, Dept.
Psychiatry as Professor in Psychiatry. She was previously Professor of
Psychiatry in the Division of Psychological Medicine, Institute of Psychiatry,
King’s College, London, UK.
Her research has aimed to examine the brain basis of normal emotion and the
extent to which neural mechanisms underlying emotion are abnormal in individuals
with mood and anxiety disorders.
Using functional neuroimaging techniques, she has measured neural mechanisms of emotion in healthy and mood-disordered populations. Her findings indicate that individuals with mood disorders such as
bipolar disorder and unipolar depression show abnormal increases in regions in
the brain known to be important in the response to emotional stimuli.
Moreover, her recent findings suggest that these different mood disorders may
be characterized by distinguishable patterns of abnormality in these brain
regions. These latter findings have the potential to be used in the future as
diagnostic tools to help improve accuracy of early diagnosis of these
distressing psychiatric conditions.
Furthermore, using increasingly sophisticated methods of data analyses,
we are now able to examine temporal relationships between activity in different
brain regions during performance of specific cognitive-emotional tasks. This will enable us to understand more about the nature of the specific
neural networks involved in emotion perception in normal and psychiatric groups.
The Neuroscience and Emotions Groups form part of the large Neuroimaging Program,
developed in 2004, at the Western Psychiatric Institute. The aim of the
Program is to explore abnormalites in psychiatric populations using a
multi-disciplinary approach. Neuroimaging studies of emotional processing
will be combined with both genetic and pharmacological challenge studies.
This page was last modified on:
7/27/06 |
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