Grant: Project Grant

Emotion fundamentally defines experience and is altered in disorders such as anxiety and depression. While a lot of research has worked to understand how emotion is represented in the brain, many questions remain. We have developed a new paradigm to study how mice process a key building block of emotion, valance i.e. the intrinsic pleasantness of unpleasantness of a stimulus. We can use this to examine how the brain represents valence and this might change with experience such as chronic stress. Because valence could be represented in different ways and at different levels of organization, we are using a range of techniques to study valence representations at the level of single cells, groups of cells, and networks of cells that span multiple brain regions. This work will contribute important new insight into how the brain processes valence that can be applied to understand how valence processing becomes disrupted in psychiatric disorders.