Clinical/Community and Brain and Cognition Divisions

I am interested in understanding mechanisms relating cognitive, emotional, and physiological aspects of normal and abnormal human behavior, using the methods of clinical, cognitive, and affective psychophysiology / neuroscience. This work involves a variety of studies of cognitive and emotional processing in psychiatric patients, nonpatients with diagnosable psychopathology, and control subjects. Interests include attentional control, emotional regulation, and sensory processes as well as development of signal-processing methods and multimodal neuroimaging integration methods to pursue our substantive questions. We conduct fMRI studies that parallel our dense-array scalp event-related brain potential (ERP) studies. We also conduct structured diagnostic interviews with virtually all our patient and nonpatient subjects. In collaboration with Prof. Wendy Heller, the fMRI / EEG studies address questions of regional brain specialization in emotion, with a particular interest in differentiation of depression, anxiety, and subtypes of each diagnosis. Subject recruitment sources include the Psychological Services Center, where I am a part-time clinician and supervisor; the Psychology subject pool; and the community. I collaborate with Brigitte Rockstroh and Thomas Elbert and their group at the U. of Konstanz (Germany) in MEG and EEG studies of compromised sensory, emotional, and cognitive processing in psychopathology. Some of my publications are tutorials on method issues in psychophysiology / cognitive neuroscience, and other publications address philosophy-of-science issues that arise in psychological and biological research on cognition, emotion, and psychopathology. Besides having served as Director of the Biomedical Imaging Center, I have been Director of Clinical Training and Associate Head in the Dept. of Psychology and am now Cognitive Neuroscience Group Leader at the Beckman Institute and Program Director of the "Training in Cognitive Psychophysiology" NIMH training grant.

Representative Publications:

• Engels, A.S., Heller, W., Spielberg, J.M., Warren, S.L., Sutton, B.P, Banich, M.T., & Miller, G.A. (In press). Anxiety comorbidity influences patterns of brain asymmetry in depression. Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience.
• Fisher, J.E., Sass, S.M., Heller, W., Silton, R.L., Edgar, C.E., Stewart, J.L., & Miller, G.A. (In press). Time course of processing emotional stimuli as a function of perceived emotional intelligence, anxiety, and depression. Emotion.
• Sass, S.M., Heller, W., Stewart, J.L., Silton, R.L., Edgar, C., Fisher, J.E., & Miller, G.A. (In press). Time course of attentional bias to threat in anxiety: Emotion and gender specificity. Psychophysiology.
• Herrington, J.D., Heller, W., Mohanty, A., Engels, A., Banich, M.T., Webb, A.W., & Miller, G.A. (In press). Localization of asymmetric brain function in emotion and depression. Psychophysiology.
• Silton, R.L., Miller, G.A., Towers, D.N., Engels, A.S., Edgar, J.C., Spielberg, J.M., Sass, S.M., Stewart, J.L., Sutton, B.P., Banich, M.T., & Heller, W. (In press). The time course of activity in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex during top-down attentional control. NeuroImage.

Classes Recently Taught:

• Principles of Psychophysiology
• Introduction to Clinical Psychology sections on psychopathology and neuroscience
• Clinical Psychology Practicum Laboratory (inpatient diagnosis, outpatient psychotherapy)