Seminars

Endocannabinoids have been well established as regulators of the neurobehavioral response to stress. This talk will focus on highlighting the neural circuits and mechanisms by which endocannabinoids have been found to modulate both neuroendocrine and behavioral responses to stress, with an emphasis on translational implications of these findings to human populations afflicted with stress-related neuropsychiatric conditions, particularly anxiety disorders and PTSD.

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The ability to control automatic emotional actions constitutes a critical component of emotion regulation during socially threatening situations. For instance, under acute social threat, goal directed decision-making depends largely on the capacity to override automatic defensive actions such as freezing reactions or fight-or-flight actions. Distinct parts of the frontal cortex are implicated in regulating these defensive reactions.

Over the last two decades, neuroimaging has provided ample knowledge on the structure, function and connectivity of the human brain as well as the aberrations thereof in patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders. In this context, the long predominant paradigm has been to compare (mean) local volume or activity between groups, or to correlate these to behavioral phenotypes. Such approach, however, is intrinsically limited in terms of possible insight into inter-individual differences and application in clinical practice. Recently, the increasing availability of large cohort data and tools for multivariate statistical learning, allowing the prediction of individual cognitive or clinical phenotypes in new subjects, have started a revolution in imaging neuroscience.