E3: Executive Control and Emotional Meanings in Cognitive and Neural Systems

In a range of clinical conditions like depression, anxiety, mania or eating disorders, some individuals come to think about themselves, others and the world in ways that can be well outside the range characteristic of normal healthy people. Part of this may involve the particular mental models they develop of themselves as failures in life or of the world as containing extreme threats to their well-being or self-esteem. Another part has to do with the dynamics of their moment-to-moment thought. Different patients groups may, for example, not only experience extreme emotions, but they may get stuck repeatedly thinking about the same ideas, or repeatedly performing actions. They may have difficulty concentrating on their work or social context. We examine how both normal and clinical populations attend to aspects of meaning that are important to them, and how they remember events and make decisions about actions. The objective of this project is to develop a set of inter-related models of normal cognition as well as different psychopathologies that is sufficiently precise to guide the development of new treatment interventions to move abnormal cognition and affect back into its normal range.

The overall aim of this research programme has been to model how thought and emotion interact within mental activity characteristic of normal and clinical samples, such as the depressed or anxious. Work in the previous quinquennium focussed on modelling the human mental architecture in terms of patterns of interactions among nine major subsystems. A distinctive feature of this model is the idea that human executive processes could be thought of as involving a dialogue between two meaning subsystems - one dealing with the kind of conceptual meaning expressed in sentences and the other a more abstract type of meaning that integrates over information from multimodal sources - conceptual, sensory and proprioceptive. This second type of meaning is where ideation and emotion intersect. A key practical objective of the programme is to provide inter-related accounts of a range of psychopathologies. Work conducted in the last quinquennium is currently being written up with no new empirical work being undertaken. The programme will end on 31st March 2010.