Uncertainty is often associated with subjective distress and a potentiated anxiety response. Occurrence uncertainty, or the inability to predict if a threat will occur, has rarely been compared experimentally with temporal uncertainty, or the inability to predict when a threat will occur. The current study aimed to (a) directly compare the anxiogenic effects of anticipating […]
Author Archives: Christine L. Larson
Conservatism and the Neural Circuitry of Threat: Economic Conservatism Predicts Greater Amygdala-BNST Connectivity During Periods of Threat vs. Safety
Political conservatism is associated with an increased negativity bias, including increased attention and reactivity toward negative and threatening stimuli. Although the amygdala has been implicated in the human response to threatening stimuli, no studies to date have investigated whether conservatism is associated with altered amygdala function toward threat. Furthermore, although an influential theory (Davis et […]
Congratulations to Tara Miskovich, winner of a 2017 APA Dissertation Research Award!
Neural circuitry governing anxious individuals’ mis-allocation of working memory to threat
Dispositional anxiety is a trait-like phenotype that confers increased risk for a range of debilitating neuropsychiatric disorders. Like many patients with anxiety disorders, individuals with elevated levels of dispositional anxiety are prone to intrusive and distressing thoughts in the absence of immediate threat. Recent electrophysiological research suggests that these symptoms are rooted in the mis-allocation […]
Congratulations to Maddie Kallenbach, who earned top honors for poster at the UWM Undergraduate Research Symposium!
Congratulations to Tara Miskovich on her successful dissertation defense!
Walker Pedersen published the first paper based on data from the 7T scanner at the Medical College of Wisconsin
See Walker’s new paper on the effects of stimulus novelty and valence in Neuroimage.
Congratulations to Walker Pedersen and Kevin Haworth on their successful dissertation defenses!
Disentangling the effects of novelty, valence and trait anxiety in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, amygdala and hippocampus with high resolution 7T fMRI
The hippocampus and amygdala exhibit sensitivity to stimulus novelty that is reduced in participants with inhibited temperament, which is related to trait anxiety. Although the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) is highly connected to the amygdala and is implicated in anxiety, whether the BNST responds to novelty remains unstudied, as well as how […]
Imbalance of Default Mode and Regulatory Networks during Externally-Focused Processing in Depression
abstract A core cognitive vulnerability in major depressive disorder (MDD) is the tendency to ruminate. Attentional control difficulties likely underlie this maladaptive thinking style. Previous studies suggest that abnormalities in the default mode, executive, and salience networks are implicated in both rumination and attentional control difficulties in MDD. In the current study, individuals with MDD […]
