Emotional experiences and their regulation are vital for functioning in everyday life and mental health. Dysregulations in these domains critically impede adaptive functioning and represent a transdiagnostic feature across major mental disorders. A significant proportion of individuals with pathological dysregulations in these domains do not respond to the currently available treatments and thus integrated translational strategies that precisely determine the underlying brain systems and explore novel strategies to modulate the identified targets are urgently needed. In the present talk I will outline innovative synergistic strategies that (1) combine advanced MRI-based neuroimaging with machine learning-based neural decoding (neuroaffective signatures) to accurately predict the emotional state of an individual based on distributed neural activity and connectivity patterns and that (2) precisely modulate the underlying neural mechanisms by means of targeting neuropeptide systems (Oxytocin, Angiotensin II, etc) to enhance regulation of negative emotional states and motivation.
Benjamin Becker is currently a Full Professor at The University of Hong Kong, Adjunct Professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and Director of the Neuroscience of Cognition, Affect and Motivation Lab (Beckerlab.org). He received his Master and PhD Degrees at the Universities of Trier and Duesseldorf (Germany) and underwent further training at the University of Bonn (Germany). He has established and led independent international research teams in Germany, China Mainland and Hong Kong. His research aims to explore how the human brain regulates emotional and motivational experiences, how these processes become dysfunctional in mental disorders and how these processes can be modulated by innovative technological and pharmacological means. To this end his team capitalizes on an entire array of strategies, including advanced MRI-neuroimaging, AI-inspired neural decoding, real-time closed-loop brain modulation and pharmacological neuroenhancement (oxytocin, angiotensin II, etc). The endevors led to more than 250 original publications in international journals including Nature Human Behaviour, Advanced Science, Nature Communications, PNAS, Molecular Psychiatry, American Journal of Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry and perspective articles in Nature, TICS, Nature Reviews in Psychology, etc. (> 10000 citations, H-index 55, i10 180). Professor Becker currently serves on the editorial boards of several international journals, including Psychopharmacology (Principal Editor), Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, or Psychoradiology and was the founding section editor-in-chief of Frontiers in Social and Affective Neuroimaging. He co-directs the COVID-induced Brain Dysfunction task force of the Global Brain Consortium (GBC), and coordinates the Cognitive Science Programme at the HKU.
Host: Prof Yueyuan ZHENG, Research Assistant Professor, Division of Social Science, HKUST