Our research goal is to understand sensory and perceptual anomalies in anxiety disorders and to develop novel behavioral and neural interventions targeting sensory/perceptual roots of various anxiety pathologies. Our multi-disciplinary research integrates clinical psychology, cognitive, and affective neuroscience, adopting multi-modal methodologies such as psychophysics, psychophysiology, fMRI, EEG, and transcranial electrical stimulation (tES).
Anxiety disorders, cognition, emotion, and neuroscience
Research Description
*Clancy, K.; Ding, M.; Bernat, E.; Schmidt, N.B.; Li, W. (2017). Restless ‘rest’: intrinsic sensory hyperactivity and disinhibition in post-traumatic stress disorder. Brain 2017. 140(7): 1-10. doi: 10.1093/brain/awx116. [PDF]
*Forscher, E., *Zheng, Y., *Ke, Z., & Folstein, J., & Li, W. (2016). Decomposing fear perception: A combination of psychophysics and neurometric modeling of fear perception. Neuropsychologia, 91:254-261. PMID: 27546075. [PDF]
*You, Y., & Li, W. (2016). Parallel processing of general and specific threat during early stages of perception. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 11:395-404. PMID: 26412811. [PDF]
*Novak, L.R., Gitelman, D.R., Schuyler, B, and Li, W. (2015). Olfactory-visual integration facilitates perception of subthreshold negative emotion. Neuropsychologia, 77:288-297. [PDF]
Li, W. (2014). Learning to smell danger: Acquired associative representation of threat in the olfactory cortex. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 8(98):1-8. [PDF]
*Krusemark, E.A., *Novak, L., Gitelman, D., & Li, W. (2013). When the sense of smell meets emotion: Anxiety-state--dependent olfactory processing and neural circuitry adaptation. Journal of Neuroscience, 33:15324-15332. [PDF]
*Krusemark, E.A. & Li, W. (2013).From Early sensory specialization to later perceptual generalization: Dynamic temporal progression in perceiving individual threats. Journal of Neuroscience, 33:587-94. [PDF]
*Krusemark, E.A., & Li, W. (2011). Do all threats work the same way? Divergent effects of fear and disgust on sensoryperception and attention. Journal of Neuroscience, 31:3429-34. [PDF]
Li, W., Howard, J. D., Parrish, T., & Gottfried, J.A. (2008). Aversive learning enhances perceptual and cortical discrimination of indiscriminable odor cues. Science, 319:1842-1845. [Highlighted in Nature, 452, 506 (2008).] [PDF]
*denotes trainee of CANLab