Dr. Joey Dunsmoor and Dr. Jarrod Lewis-Peacock received and R01 from the National Institutes of Helath for their proposal entitled "Isolating competing memories of fear and safety in the human brain".
In psychiatric disorders characterized by severe stress and anxiety, memories of safety are more difficult to learn and remember than memories of threat, perhaps explaining relapse after therapy. The proposed research uses multivariate pattern analysis of neuroimaging data to localize and manipulate the neural representation of threat and safety memories in the human brain. This research could lay the theoretical groundwork for more effective clinical treatments for anxiety and stress-related disorders.