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Cognitive Neuroscience

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Theses/Dissertations

2013

Prefrontal cortex

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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Flexibly Adapting To Emotional Cues: Examining The Functional And Structural Correlates Of Emotional Reactivity And Emotion Control In Healthy And Depressed Individuals, Steven G. Greening Jun 2013

Flexibly Adapting To Emotional Cues: Examining The Functional And Structural Correlates Of Emotional Reactivity And Emotion Control In Healthy And Depressed Individuals, Steven G. Greening

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The ability of emotionally significant stimuli to bias our behaviour is an evolutionarily adaptive phenomenon. However, sometimes emotions become excessive, inappropriate, and even pathological, like in major depressive disorder (MDD). Emotional flexibility includes both the neural processes involved in reacting to, or representing, emotional significance, and those involved in controlling emotional reactivity. MDD represents a potentially distinct form of emotion (in)flexibility, and therefore offers a unique perspective for understanding both the integration of conflicting emotional cues and the neural regions involved in actively controlling emotional systems.

The present investigation of emotional flexibility began by considering the functional neural correlates of …


Exploring The Neural Basis Of Top-Down Guided Action In Macaque Monkeys, Jessica M. Phillips Mar 2013

Exploring The Neural Basis Of Top-Down Guided Action In Macaque Monkeys, Jessica M. Phillips

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

To thoroughly characterize any brain mechanism requires an appropriate animal model for invasive studies. An invaluable model system used toward a comprehension of cognitive neurophysiology is the macaque monkey. It is important to delineate similarities and limitations for this model in relation to the human brain and cognition. In this thesis, we have thus conducted three experiments to investigate putative generalizations between monkeys and humans regarding the neural processes associated with top-down action control in monkeys.

Our daily behaviour is largely comprised of automatic routine actions. The frequent repetition of certain behaviours in response to particular contexts can give rise …