Title: 'Functional Imaging Studies of Social Emotions and Decision Making'
Speaker: Roland Zahn (UoM), Deborah Talmi (UoM), Matthias Gamer (Hamburg), Christopher Eisenegger (Vienna)
This symposium draws together national and international expertise on neuroimaging of social emotions and decision-making. Social emotions guide our behaviour and decisions in everyday life and "social neuroscience" has emerged as a distinct discipline in recent years. In this symposium, experts will talk about how they investigate the impact of social emotions on decision-making, using a range of paradigms and methodologies including functional brain imaging. The talks will explore connections between brain regions associated with social emotions and those regions associated with different kinds of social decision-making. For more information, please see draft programme.
Biography: Dr. Matthias Gamer, Department of Systems Neuroscience, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf
After studying psychology from 1997 to 2003, Matthias Gamer obtained his PhD from the University of Mainz (Germany) in 2008, working on visual depth perception. He then moved to the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (Germany) to join the Department of Systems Neuroscience as a postdoctoral researcher. Since 2011, he is heading the independent research group “Social and Applied Psychophysiology” at the same institution.
His current research focuses on the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying basic socio-emotional functions. On the one hand, he is examining how social signals (especially facial expressions) are processed in the brain, how they are perceived and evaluated in mental disorders (e.g., social phobia) and how these processes can be modulated by exogenously administered neuropeptides. The second main interest is the cognitive neuroscience of deception with a special focus on the modulatory effects of emotion on attention and memory.
To study these issues, he uses a multimodal approach consisting of behavioral studies involving a measurement of eye movements and autonomic responses, as well as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) techniques.
If you would like to register for this symposium, please complete the on-line registration form - https://apps.mhs.manchester.ac.uk/surveys/TakeSurvey.aspx?PageNumber=1&SurveyID=98LI8l51&Preview=true
