Research Projects

Early life stress and amygdala development

Growing up is hard to do, and for primates (including humans) progressing through childhood and adolescence takes a long time. During childhood and adolescence, brain regions grow and their connections are made and refined. The relative immaturity of the brain at birth, and protracted dependency of the child on parents, makes studying primate models critical.

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Integrating social networks through the amygdala

The salience network is an interconnected set of brain ‘hubs’ that active together during arousing emotional states. In contrast, the ‘social’ brain hubs are considered more ‘cognitive’ and are active when subjects observe emotion in others. These networks appear to operate separately to tag different tasks at the cortical level in functional imaging studies. However, social information has the highest level of salience for humans. Psychiatric syndromes are frequently characterized by miscoding the intensity, relevance, valence, or shifts of social cues—in short, their salience. Integration of these paths must therefore occur.

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Dopamine and Stress: Circuits Through the Extended Amygdala

In 2000, we found that a structure known as the ‘extended amygdala’ had a direct impact on dopamine system in primates(1, 2). Although the idea was novel—and somewhat controversial-- at that time, subsequent work from other laboratories and our own indicate that the extended amygdala-dopamine pathway is an important pathway mediating the effects of stress-induced behaviors, including depressive-like symptoms and drug-seeking.

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