Project
Neural mechanisms of emotional response patterning and system synchronization
Note
I studied Technical Engineering, Science of Education, Sociology, and Psychology at the Universities of München (Germany), Augsburg (Germany), Hamburg (Germany) and Bremen (Germany). I graduated in Science of Education and Sociology in 2001 and in Psychology in 2006. I received my Ph.D. at Bremen University in 2008 with a dissertation project on the modulatory influences of contextual features on the neural processing of facial expressions. Recently I was also interested in the neural correlates of emotional and cognitive conflict processing and in individual differences in perceptual encoding strategies during face perception. At the University of Geneva and the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences I am currently engaged as Senior Researcher on different projects on dynamic connectivity patterns of local and remote brain regions during emotional prosody perception and expression using high-resolution brain scans and specific connectivity modeling approaches for functional imaging data. I am also PI on a SNSF funded project (N° 105314_146559/1) about neural bottom-up and top-down mechansims during the perception of human vocalizations.
Current Research
Project 1: Identifying the cortical and subcortical network for emotional prosody processing using high resolution fMRI (on 3T and 7T scanners)
Project 2: Impaired neural processing of affective voices in MTL patients
Project 3: Brain mechanisms for the expression of vocal emotions in speech and singing
Project 4: Computational anatomy of the limbic system.