Research Interests - Richard Davidson:
Research in the Davidson Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience is focused on the neural substrates of emotion, mood, emotional regulation, and affective style and disorders of emotion. These topics are explored in many different groups ranging in age from infants through old age and in both normal individuals and individuals with specific types of disorders, including both adult (e.g., mood and anxiety disorders) and childhood (e.g., autism, fragile X) psychiatric, neurological and genetic disorders.
Some of our work addresses relations between the central circuitry of emotion and affective style and peripheral biological systems that are consequential for health (the autonomic, endocrine and immune systems).
Methods that are featured in the Davidson lab include functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging, quantitative high-density electrophysiology and positron-emission tomography. In addition, autonomic, endocrine and immune measures are frequently obtained in particular studies.
The overriding theme that is common among most work conducted in the lab concerns the neural mechanisms that underlie individual differences in specific parameters of emotional reactivity. Such individual differences are viewed as central to understanding risk for various types of pathology.