Social and Affective Neuroscience, Neuroecology and Neurophilosophy.

The Fear, Anxiety and Biosocial Lab is inspired by insights from behavioural ecology, social and clinical psychology and endeavors to understand the central determinants of the human emotional experience. We employ brain imaging (e.g. fMRI) and behavioural techniques to examine the neurobiological systems that coordinate fear in humans.  Our theoretical stance rests on the long-standing view that fear is an evolutionarily favorable response, whereby increasingly unambiguous threat leads to a cascade of defensive responses that can be dichotomized as slow thoughtful actions vs. fast instinctive reactions.  A second stream of research aims to determine the neural proxies that underlie social cognition. Previous research has surveyed the neural basis of vicarious reward, competition, altruism, and social emotions such as envy. We are currently pursuing questions of how social behavior orchestrates and shapes emotion and how such operations are variably disrupted in psychiatric disorders.

Please see the Lab website for more details.

Mobbs, D., Yu, R., Rowe, J., FeldmanHall, O., Dalgleish, T. (2010).  Neural activity associated with monitoring the oscillating threat value of a Tarantula. Proc Natl Acad Sci. USA.  107(47):20582-6.

Mobbs, D., Meyer, M., Yu, R., Passamonti, L., Seymour,  B.J., Calder A.J., Schweizer, S., Frith, C.D., Dalgleish,  T. (2009).  A key role for similarity in vicarious reward.  Science. 324, 900.

Takahashi, H., Kato, M., Matsuura, M., Mobbs, D., Suhara, T., Okubo, Y. (2009). When Your Gain Is My Pain and YourPain is My Gain: Neural Correlates of Envy and Schandenfreude.  Science.  323, 937-939.

Mobbs, D., Petrovic, P., Marchant, J., Hassabis, D., Seymour, B., Weiskopf, N., Dolan, R.J., Frith, C.D (2007). When Fear is Near: Threat Imminence Elicits Prefrontal - Periaqueductal Grey Shifts in Humans. Science. 317; 1079-1083.

Mobbs, D., Lau, H.C., Jones, O.D., Frith, C.D. (2007). Law, Responsibility and the Brain.  PLoS-Biology. 5; E103.

• PSYC W4485: Mind, Brain and Behavior. Fall 2012-

• PSYC G1010: Seminar in Affective Neuroscience. 2013-