Affective Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

The aim of this seminar series is to provide a forum where members of the Berkeley community involved or interested in neuroimaging can come together to discuss issues pertaining to neuroimaging research. Participation is not limited to graduate students and the meeting is open to undergraduates, post-docs, faculty etc. No prior experience with neuroimaging is required. Members of the Brain Imaging Center attend and there are opportunities for people to raise questions and issues that others might be able to help them with/ comment upon. The easiest way to get feedback on a study design or analysis is through doing a project presentation. If your data is already fully analyzed this is also a great opportunity for sharing your results with the community and practicing giving a research talk. Currently, we are using a rota system with labs taking it in turn to present. In addition to project presentations, there is typically a mixture of talks, journal club items, and an analysis clinic run by Matthew Brett. There is also a monthly 'BIC' slot when Ben Inglis covers current UCB specific imaging acquisition issues, does Q&A and combines this with an image acquisition talk. It is intended that this meeting should encourage cross-talk between labs and sharing of expertise and give participants experience in presenting any findings that they have gathered. The aim is that this should be a meeting that can grow to meet the needs of the local community and input as to what people would like to see/hear within the weekly meetings is welcome. Assessment for graduate student participants is based upon attendance and participation in the weekly discussion.

Seminars from Spring 2009
Seminars from Spring 2010
Seminars from Fall 2010

Neuroimaging in Practice:

This seminar series combined seminars on current issues in neuroimaging research (e.g. imaging genomics, advantages and limitations of granger causality analysis of fmri data) with a mini lab course which took participants through the steps involved in running an fMRI experiment from design to data collection, data quality diagnostics & analysis and testing predictions regarding the relative efficiency of blocked and event related designs.

Undergraduate Courses

Introduction to Clinical Psychology:

Both clinical psychology researchers and practitioners need to be able to critically evaluate the evidence for or against the kind of claims they will come across frequently in their day to day work let alone in the lay media (e.g. 'latest data shows anti-depressants are no better than placebo', 'teenage use of marijuana increases risk for Schizophrenia'). In this course, I aim to provide the initial foundation for this analytic ability and to introduce students to key current issues in clinical psychology. Specifically, the course covers the neural and cognitive basis and clinical symptomatology associated with conditions ranging from Anxiety Disorders and Major Depression through to Schizophrenia and Eating Disorders. Primary articles are used to illustrate recent research testing cognitive and neurocognitive models of these disorders and treatment trials of pharmacological and cognitive therapies. A good knowledge of statistics will be of assistance (e.g. having taken Psych 101 before this course). The debate over the value of DSM diagnostic categories versus continuous measures of symptoms will be highlighted and videos used to illustrate the presentation of different conditions.
Textbook: Kring, A. M., Davison, G. A et al. 2007 Abnormal Psychology 10th Edition. Wiley Primary research articles are also used as source materials.