Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience

Beginning with PET activation studies, and then fMRI BOLD, I and my colleagues were one of the earliest groups to map brain circuits involved in processing emotional stimuli. We synthesized findings with influential meta-analytic work (Phan et al, 2002), and were one of the early groups to identify the role of the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dMPFC) in emotion and personal salience (Taylor et al, 2003; Phan et al, 2004). We published one of the first accounts of the influence of simple rating on brain activation to emotional stimuli, demonstrating a basic, but important, form of cognitive-emotional interaction (Taylor et al, 2003). This work has formed the basis of my later work examining emotion dysregulation in neuropsychiatric conditions (Taylor & Liberzon, 2007).

The control of behavior requires an executive function to monitor performance and adjust when actual behaviors do not match intended behaviors (Taylor et al, 2007). We published one of the earliest studies showing the involvement of the posterior medial prefrontal cortex/anterior cingulate cortex (pMFC) in an interference task, which recruits performance monitoring circuitry in the pMFC (Taylor et al, 1994). We have also demonstrated how ventral aspects of the MFC code value and motivational salience during task performance (Taylor et al 2006), and we have published work showing the importance of individual differences in the recruitment of MFC activity in task execution (Stern et al, 2009). These differences in the relationship between task execution and motivation are critical in psychiatric conditions, where the motivation to engage in a task may be reduced (e.g. in schizophrenia, Stern et al 2009), or pathologically enhanced (e.g. in OCD, Fitzgerald et al 2005; Stern et al 2011).