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