Grant: Operating Grant

The capacity for higher order cognition and ethical behaviour are pointed to as the pinnacle of human evolution. The present research program will consider how evolutionarily older parts of the brain associated with primitive emotional responses also play a critical role in higher order cognition. Using multiple approaches, including reports of emotional experience, facial expression analysis, and functional magnetic resonance imaging, we will examine how emotions and evolutionarily older biological systems have a pervasive influence on cognition. To do so will focus on disgust, examines its basis in oral distaste and extension in the moral domain. Further we will examine whether, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a disorder characterized by pathological disgust, increases the role emotions play in moral judgment. Findings from this research may aid in understanding how emotions can both enhance cognition but also render it dysfunctional, resulting in cognitive impairments central to mental health disorders.