Insula function is considered critical for many motivated behaviors, with proposed functions
ranging from attention, behavioral control, emotional regulation, goal-directed and aversion …

Pain is a fundamental experience that promotes survival. In humans, pain stands at the
intersection of multiple health crises: chronic pain, the opioid epidemic, and health …

Threat-anticipatory defensive responses have evolved to promote survival in a dynamic
world. While inherently adaptive, aberrant expression of defensive responses to potential …

Anticipated nostalgia is the foreseeing of looking back on life events and expecting to feel
nostalgic about it in the future. I review recent findings on the content, affective profile, and …

Preadolescence is a period of increased vulnerability for anxiety, especially among Latina
girls. Reduced microstructure (fractional anisotropy; FA) of white matter tracts between limbic …

Stressful life events are ubiquitous and well-known to negatively impact mental health.
However, in both humans and animal models, there is large individual variability in how …

Excessive expression of fear responses in anticipation of threat occurs in anxiety, but
understanding of underlying pathophysiological mechanisms is limited. Animal research …

Influential theories implicate variations in the mechanisms supporting threat learning in the
severity of anxiety symptoms. We use computational models of associative learning in …

Elevated threat appraisal is a postulated neurodevelopmental mechanism of anxiety
disorders. However, laboratory-assessed threat appraisals are task-specific and subject to …

Excessive fear responses to uncertain threat are a key feature of anxiety disorders (ADs),
though most mechanistic work considers adults. As ADs onset in childhood and confer risk …