Special Issue on Emotion-Cognition Interactions with commentary from the Shackman lab
We’re very pleased to announce the completion of a special issue of Frontiers in Human Neuroscience devoted to The Neurobiology of Emotion-Cognition interactions.
The special issue was edited by Talma Hendler (Tel Aviv), Hadas Okon-Singer (Haifa), Luiz Pessoa (Maryland) and Dr. Shackman and features 35 reports and reviews from leading investigators in North American, Israel, and Europe—more than 100 authors in all. This work encompasses a broad spectrum of populations and showcases a wide variety of exciting new paradigms, measures, analytic strategies, and conceptual approaches.
This work appears to be making a splash—already, the 35 contributions to this Special Topic have been viewed on the Frontiers website ~90,000 times, shared or posted to social media networks >16,000 times, downloaded >13,000 times, and cited ~90 times.
For more information
Take a look at the special issue: http://journal.frontiersin.org/ResearchTopic/909
Read our Introduction to the special issue: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2014.01051/full
Read our commentary on The Neurobiology of Emotion-Cognition Interactions: Fundamental Questions and Strategies for Future Research: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00058/abstract
Read a more detailed summary:
Recent years have witnessed the emergence of powerful new tools for assaying the brain and a remarkable acceleration of research focused on the interplay of emotion and cognition. This work has begun to yield new insights into fundamental questions about the nature of the mind and important clues about the origins of mental illness. In particular, this research demonstrates that stress, anxiety, and other kinds of emotion can profoundly influence key elements of cognition, including selective attention, working memory, and cognitive control. Often, this influence persists beyond the duration of transient emotional challenges, partially reflecting the slower molecular dynamics of catecholamine and hormonal neurochemistry. In turn, circuits involved in attention, executive control, and working memory contribute to the regulation of emotion. The distinction between the ‘emotional’ and the ‘cognitive’ brain is fuzzy and context-dependent. Indeed, there is compelling evidence that brain territories and psychological processes commonly associated with cognition, such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and working memory, play a central role in emotion. Furthermore, putatively emotional and cognitive regions influence one another via a complex web of connections in ways that jointly contribute to adaptive and maladaptive behavior. This work demonstrates that emotion and cognition are deeply interwoven in the fabric of the brain, suggesting that widely held beliefs about the key constituents of ‘the emotional brain’ and ‘the cognitive brain’ are fundamentally flawed. Developing a deeper understanding of the emotional-cognitive brain is important, not just for understanding the mind but also for elucidating the root causes of its many debilitating disorders.