Affective Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory

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Research Overview In my research program, I make use of an individual differences approach to address how different trait characteristics and differences in genetic make-up impact upon the neural mechanisms underlying our responses to potentially threatening or rewarding stimuli. I am particularly interested in the factors determining how ‘top-down’ control mechanisms and ‘bottom-up’ emotional saliency mechanisms interact to influence behavior. Here, questions I am concerned with range from: do emotional distractors compete for attention in the same way as perceptually salient distractors or distractors giving rise to response conflict? Do high anxious individuals show impoverished recruitment of prefrontal control mechanisms? How does the processing of negative and positive stimuli differ? Does the evidence support either ‘weak’ or ‘strong’ automaticity accounts of the processing of emotionally salient stimuli? Can we identify genetic factors that modulate the neural systems underlying threat detection, reward processing and attentional control? I am interested in addressing these questions from a number of different perspectives using approaches including cognitive-behavioral studies, functional neuroimaging, functional genomics, and work with clinical populations.
5315 Tolman Hall #1650
Dept Psychology, UC Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
94720-1650
sbishop-at-berkeley.edu
Recent directions include investigation of anxiety-related biases in perception and the resolution of perceptual ambiguity, individual differences in face processing (both identity and expression) and trait anxiety influences upon the neural substrate of fear-conditioning. I am particularly interested in taking students/post-docs interested in these areas. Please contact me for further details.
I am an assistant professor within the Department of Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. I am accepting graduate students through HWNI, and through CBB and Clinical areas within Psychology. I do not have any current post-doctoral or RA openings but please contact me if interested for summer 2010 onwards.