Faculty

Srikanth Padmala

Phone : +91 80 2293 3435
E-Mail : spadmala[at]iisc.ac.in
Emotion and Cognition Lab

Research Areas

Interactions between Emotion, Motivation, and Cognition.

Research Details

Throughout our lives, emotional and/or motivational factors influence our thoughts and actions. Hence, there is a clear need to understand how emotion, motivation, and cognition interact in the human brain. Knowledge of brain mechanisms underlying these interactions is not only relevant to our healthy lives but also has potential clinical relevance. In mental disorders such as addiction, anxiety, and depression, cognitive impairments due to compromised emotional and/or motivational processing are extensively reported. Despite this, our understanding of how these factors interact in the brain is rudimentary. Our work attempts to fill some of these critical gaps in our knowledge base by investigating interactions between emotion, motivation, and cognition in the healthy adult human brain. We primarily employ behavioral and functional MRI (fMRI) methods combined with psychophysiological measurements (e.g., pupillometry) in our research.