fMRI brain scan taken while participants listened to music

Emotion

Emotion

Investigators in the UC Davis Neuroscience Consortium work with both human populations and animal models to understand how emotions arise, how they are regulated in neurotypical individuals and how they are dysregulated in neurological and mental health disorders. Closely related topics of interest involve motivation, reinforcement and arousal. Research in this area is supported by 15 faculty members from 5 departments and 7 centers.

Faculty studying emotion:

Karen L. Bales, Ph.D. Behavioral neuroscience of social bonds
Eliza Bliss-Moreau, Ph.D. Affective neuroscience
Lindsay C. Bowman, Ph.D. Cognitive and environmental factors that influence development of the social brain
Diasynou Fioravante, Ph.D. Neural circuits for prediction, learning and memory
Andrew S.Fox, Ph.D. Neurobiology of “affective style”
Amanda E.Guyer, Ph.D. Adolescent neurodevelopment in health and depression, anxiety, and substance use
Paul Hastings, Ph.D. Development of physiological, social and emotional functioning from early childhood into adulthood
Richard Huskey, Ph.D. Cognitive control, decision-making and reward, neuroimaging, computational and behavioral modeling
Petr Janata, Ph.D. Cognitive neuroscience of music
Kristin Lagattuta, Ph.D. Age-related changes and individual differences in emotion understanding, theory of mind, moral cognition, and past-to-future reasoning
Johnna Swartz, Ph.D. Brain development and the development of mood and anxiety disorders
Brian Trainor, Ph.D. Effects of stress on the brain and behavior; mood and anxiety disorders
Brian Wiltgen, Ph.D. Neurobiology of learning and memory 
Andrew Yonelinas, Ph.D.  Memory, Perception and Amnesia
Jie (JZ) Zheng, Ph.D. Human memory and emotion, human intracranial electrophysiology and neuromodulation