Relationship between emotion processing and psychopathology, and between neuropsychological functioning and mood, in neuropsychiatric disorders and late-life
Research in the Paradiso laboratory focuses broadly on neural mechanisms underlying emotion processing in psychopathological conditions and aging.
The overarching hypothesis is that the neural substrates governing emotion processing are fundamental for understanding dimensions of psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia and depression. Lately the Paradiso laboratory has worked on the bases of the idiosyncratic psychopathological presentations of some depressions among older adults. These projects have included studying the neural bases of alexithymia in older age, understanding the neural underpinning of emotion processing in older age using fMRI, examining the association between decreased blood flow and reduced grey matter as a function of age in key regions of the limbic system including the anterior cingulate and insula cortex.
Ongoing projects in the laboratory address the following topics: The effects of antipsychotic medications on emotion and social cognition in schizophrenia; the relationship between ASL and BOLD fMRI signal as a function of microvascular white matter disease; social cognition and aging; the neural substrates of nondysphoric depression in late-life; prevalence, clinical and neurocognitive correlates of nondysphoric depression in different settings; motivation in late-onset depression; motivation changes following insula and basal ganglia lesions; blood flow changes associated with altered emotional experience following damage to the basal ganglia; empathy in late-life.
Experimental approaches include: 1) functional magnetic resonance imaging; 2) positron emission tomography; 3) computer based measurement of social perception and motivation; 4) analysis of structural magnetic resonance imaging; 5) neurocognitive assessment; 6) human brain lesions
“Iowa City really is the perfect place to go to graduate school. The city has enough to do to keep you busy when you have the time, and cheap enough that you can actually afford to go to a few things as well as live relatively comfortably on the stipend provided. Also, there are truly great people in the program.”