Anxiety disorders, cognition, emotion, and neuroscience

Research Description
How do people extract emotional meaning from an environmental input and respond with fear, anger or joy? Focusing on threat-relevant emotions, we approach this question from a neurosensory perspective (i.e., sensory-cortex-based threat encoding): The sensory cortex stores threat codes and thus supports active, independent encoding of threat cues during sensory processing, initiating defensive responses directly or interactively with the limbic system (Clancy et al., 2017; Li, 2014; Krusemark & Li, 2013). This sensory mechanism provides an additional pathway to threat processing beyond the limbic system, while making clear evolutionary sense by permitting categorization of biological significance of an environmental input in the initial sensory analysis, prompting people to respond with minimal delay. Furthermore, in individuals with high levels of anxiety or anxious predispositions, sensory cortical encoding of threat could be exaggerated, and combined with limbic hyperreactivity to threat and inadequate prefrontal inhibition thereof, these processes can contribute to a vicious cycle, accounting for the genesis and maintenance of pathological anxiety.

Using a combination of tools and techniques (fMRI, EEG/MEG, psychophysiology and psychophysics), our research proceeds in four directions: (1) proposing a neurosensory mechanism of threat encoding (and anxiety) that expands the existing models; (2) identifying the signature of sensory-cortical encoding of threat (in anxiety); (3) identifying sensory cortical plasticity induced by aversive learning as a mechanism underlying the formation and maintenance of threat codes in the sensory cortex; and (4) examining sensory cortical plasticity as a result of perceptual training and transcranial electrical stimulation, thereby rewriting or erasing threat codes or adjusting neural excitability in the sensory cortex to reduce fear responses and anxiety symptoms.