Planned actions, reflexive behaviors, and complex cognitions do not occur in isolation. Rather, each day we engage in a variety of activities (e.g. driving to and from work, chopping vegetables on a cutting board) that are placed within the broader context of our acute emotional state and corresponding level of arousal. Independent observations gathered from the lesion literature (animal and human), several clinical disorders (ADHD, OCD, Schizophrenia, Tourette Syndrome, Specific Phobias), and multiple electrophysiological and neuroimaging investigations, converge to suggest that several regions within the 3refrontal cortex (PFC) are critically involved in processes of voluntary inhibition, selective attention, and behavioral regulation. Many of these same PFC regions have been implicated in the experience, generation, and perception of emotion and emotional information. In particular, withdrawal-related (negative) affect, motivations, and imagery have been associated with the lateral and orbitofrontal regions of the right PFC. To date, however, few investigations have explicitly sought to examine the interactions between these systems. The research proposed in this application will directly test several hypothesized interactions between emotional processing and mechanisms of voluntary inhibition using behavioral (accuracy and response speed) and electrophysiological (e.g., LEG, EMG) techniques. Specifically, this research proposes to examine mechanisms of voluntary inhibition and selective attention under different conditions of emotional arousal, manipulated by incidental variations in threat-evoked anxiety.
| Shackman, Alexander J; Maxwell, Jeffrey S; McMenamin, Brenton W et al. (2011) Stress potentiates early and attenuates late stages of visual processing. J Neurosci 31:1156-61 |
| Maxwell, Jeffrey S; Davidson, Richard J (2007) Emotion as motion: asymmetries in approach and avoidant actions. Psychol Sci 18:1113-9 |
