Functional MRI Investigations Characterizing an Emo-Motoric Network of Emotional Experience

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Emotional stimuli capture attention, thus making it more likely that we will look at these stimuli than at other objects in our environment. This emotional advantage is also seen at the neural level—areas of the brain related to attention show more activity when perceiving emotional than neutral stimuli. However, our emotional responses do not end there. Instead, we often produce some sort of behaviour in response to the emotional stimuli. Recent brain-imaging studies have shown that emotion enhances activity in regions related to movement planning in the same way that it influences areas related to attention. A similar pattern has been observed in cells in the spinal cord, suggesting that emotion helps promote neural networks that will put us in a state of “action preparedness.” This Discovery Grant will fund Dr. Stephen Smith’s Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Winnipeg. Dr. Smith’s research team performs cutting-edge research that attempts to identify the networks in the brain and spinal cord that influence emotion-movement interactions. In the current studies, Dr. Smith and his students will use functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure activity in the brain and the spinal cord. The data from these scans will provide the most complete depiction of the neural architecture of emotional experiences currently available, and may have applications for our understanding of the neuroscience behind numerous psychological disorders.