KOSMOS Mind-Brain Lecture: Tom Johnstone (Reading)
Emotions serve important roles in guiding our decisions and preparing us for action, particularly in contexts of great personal relevance. Yet an emotion system that dominates can disrupt behaviour and ongoing cognitive activities. In this lecture I will present three different experimental studies that we have used to investigate the neural circuitry that underlies the interplay between bottom-up emotional processing and top-down cognitive control in humans. Cognitively elaborate reappraisal of emotional stimuli involving lateral and medial prefrontal cortex will be contrasted with more automatic processes shielding working memory from emotional distractor interference that involve the anterior cingulate and frontal operculum. Disruptive TMS to lateral prefrontal cortex suggests a greater role for prefrontally-mediated attentional control than acknowledged in previous models of emotion regulation.
