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 at risk for 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. In collaboration with Prof. Jose Canive at the Albuquerque VA, I conduct MEG, EEG, and structural MRI studies of compromised sensory processing, cognition, and pharmacological interventions in schizophrenia. 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 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 Department 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:

• Miller, G.A., Engels, A.S., & Herrington, J.D. (In press). The seduction of clinical science: Challenges in psychological and biological convergence. In T. Treat, R. Bootzin, & R. Levenson (Eds.), Psychological clinical science: Papers in honor of Richard McFall. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
• Levin, R. L., Heller, W., Mohanty, A., Herrington, J. D., & Miller, G. A. (In press). Cognitive deficits in depression and functional specificity of regional brain activity. R. Atchley & S. Ilardi (Eds.), Cognitive Neuroscience Perspectives on Depression, Special Issue, Cognitive Therapy and Research.
• Lu, B., Martin, K.E., Edgar, J.C., Smith, A.K., Lewis, S.F., Escamilla, M.A., Miller, G.A., & Ca*ive, J.M. (In press). Effect of catechol O-methyltransferase Val158Met polymorphism on the P50 sensory gating endophenotype in schizophrenia. Biological Psychiatry.
• Miller, G.A., Elbert, T., Sutton, B.P., & Heller, W. (2007). Invited paper: Innovative clinical assessment technologies: Challenges and opportunities in neuroimaging. Psychological Assessment, 19, 58-73.
• Engels, A.S., Heller, W., Mohanty, A., Herrington, J.D., Banich, M.T., Webb, A.G., & Miller, G.A. (2007). Specificity of regional brain activity in anxiety types during emotion processing. Psychophysiology, 44, 352-363.

Classes Recently Taught:

• Principles of Psychophysiology
• Introduction to Clinical Psychology
• Clinical Psychology Practicum Laboratory (inpatient diagnosis, outpatient psychotherapy)