Faculty

Srikanth Padmala

Assistant Professor

Phone : +91 80 2293 3435
E-Mail : spadmala[at]iisc.ac.in
web: https://cns.iisc.ac.in/srikanth

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., skin conductance responses) in our research.

Publications

Jaiswal S, Chakravarthula LN and Padmala S., (in press), (2024), Additive effects of monetary loss and positive emotion in the human brain., eNeuro.

Sivakumaran S, Chakravarthula LN and Padmala S., (in press), (2024), Role of contingency in reward-emotion interactions during the categorization of emotional facial expressions., Motivation Science.

Chakravarthula LN and Padmala S, (2023), Negative emotion reduces the discriminability of reward outcomes in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 18(1), 01-10

Chakravarthula LN and Padmala S. , (2022), Arousal-driven interactions between reward motivation and categorization of emotional facial expressions, Frontiers in Psychology (Emotion Science)

Chen G, Padmala S, Chen Y, Taylor PA, Cox RW, and Pessoa L, (2021), To pool or not to pool: Can we ignore cross-trial variability in FMRI?, NeuroImage, 225, 117496.

Limbachia C, Morrow K, Khibovska A, Meyer C, Padmala S, and Pessoa L, (2021), Controllability over stressor decreases responses in key threat-related brain areas, Communications Biology, 4(1), 1-11.

LCL. Portugal, RCS. Alves, .....,S. Padmala, G. Chen, L. Pessoa, and MG. Pereira , (2020), Interactions between emotion and action in the brain, NeuroImage, 214, 116728.

Padmala S, Sambuco N and Pessoa L, (2019), Interactions between reward motivation and emotional processing, Progress in Brain Research, 247, 1-21.

C-T Meyer*, S. Padmala* and L. Pessoa, (2019), Dynamic threat processing, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 31(4), 522-542.

C. Sours, J. Kinnison, S. Padmala, R-P. Gullapalli and L. Pessoa, (2018), Altered segregation between task-positive and task-negative regions in mild traumatic brain injury, Brain Imaging and Behavior, 12(3), 697-709.

S. Padmala*, N. Sambuco*, M. Codispoti and L. Pessoa., (2018), Attentional capture by simultaneous pleasant and unpleasant emotional distractors, Emotion, 18(8), 1189-1194.

S. Padmala, M. Sirbu and L. Pessoa, (2017), Potential reward reduces the adverse impact of negative distractor stimuli, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12, 1402-1413.

L-R Dougherty, S-L Blankenship, P-A Spechler, S. Padmala and L.Pesso, (2015), An fMRI Study of Cognitive Reappraisal in Children: Divergent Effects on Brain and Behavior, Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 37, 634-644.

J-M Choi*, S. Padmala* and L. Pessoa, (2015), Counteracting effect of threat on reward enhancements during working memory, Cognition and Emotion, 29, 1517-1526.

Yokoyama T*, S. Padmala* and L. Pessoa, (2015), Reward learning and negative emotion during rapid attentional competition, Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 269.

J-M Choi*, S. Padmala*, P. Spechler and L. Pessoa, (2014), Pervasive competition between threat and reward in the brain, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 9(6), 737-750.

G. Bissonette, R. Gentry, S. Padmala, L. Pessoa and M. Roesch, (2014), Impact of appetitive and aversive outcomes on brain responses: linking the animal and human literatures, Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 8, 24.

S. Padmala and L. Pessoa, (2014), Motivation versus aversive processing during perception, Emotion, 14(3), 450-454.

B. McMenamin, S. Langeslag, M. Sirbu, S. Padmala and L. Pessoa, (2014), Network organization unfolds over time during periods of anxious anticipation, The Journal of Neuroscience, 34(34), 11261-11273.

K. Hu*, S. Padmala* and L. Pessoa, (2013), Interactions between reward and threat during visual processing, Neuropsychologia , 51(9), 1763-1772.

K. Hu, A. Bauer, S. Padmala and L. Pessoa, (2012), Threat of bodily harm has opposing effects on cognition, Emotion , 12(1), 28-32.

J-M Choi, S. Padmala and L. Pessoa, (2012), Impact of state anxiety on the interaction between threat monitoring and cognition, Neuroimage , 59(2), 1912-1923.

L. Pessoa, S. Padmala, A. Kenzer and A. Bauer, (2012), Interactions between cognition and emotion during response inhibition, Emotion , 12(1), 192-197.

J. Kinnison, S. Padmala, J-M Choi and L. Pessoa, (2012), Network analysis reveals increased integration during emotional and motivational processing, The Journal of Neuroscience, 32(24), 8361-8372.

S. Padmala and L. Pessoa, (2011), Reward reduces conflict by enhancing attentional control and biasing visual cortical processing, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience , 23(11), 3419-3432.

S. Padmala, A. Bauer and L. Pessoa, (2011), Negative emotion impairs conflict-driven executive control, Frontiers in Psychology , 2, 192.

S. Padmala and L. Pessoa, (2010), Interactions between cognition and motivation during response inhibition, Neuropsychologia, 48(2), 558-565.

S. Padmala and L. Pessoa, (2010), Moment-to-moment fluctuations in fMRI amplitude and inter-region coupling are predictive of inhibitory performance, Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 10(2), 279-297.

S. Padmala, S-L. Lim and L. Pessoa, (2010), Pulvinar and affective significance: responses track moment-to-moment stimulus visibility, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 4, 64.

J. Engelmann, E. Damaraju, S. Padmala, and L. Pessoa, (2009), Combined effects of attention and motivation on visual task performance: Transient and sustained motivational effects, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 3, 4.

S-L. Lim, S. Padmala and L. Pessoa, (2009), Segregating the significant from the mundane on a moment-to-moment basis via direct and indirect amygdala contributions, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(39), 16841-16846.

S-L. Lim, S. Padmala and L. Pessoa, (2008), Affective learning modulates spatial competition during low-load conditions, Neuropsychologia, 46, 1267-1278.

S. Padmala and L. Pessoa, (2008), Affective learning enhances visual detection and responses in primary visual cortex, Journal of Neuroscience, 28(24), 6202-6210.

L. Pessoa and S. Padmala, (2007), Decoding near-threshold perception of fear from distributed single-trial brain activation, Cerebral Cortex, 17(3), 691-701.

L. Pessoa and S. Padmala, (2005), Quantitative prediction of perceptual decisions during near-threshold fear detection, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(15), 5612-5617.