So you’ve lost that loving feeling?

How do anxiety and depression impact brain pathways over time? Which brain changes result from cocaine abuse? How might emotions influence learning? How do difficult experiences early in life lead to depression later? What role does maternal care and touch play in emotional development and learning ability? What’s the newest technology available to understand brain regions involved in regulating emotion?

Details The fifth annual Wisconsin Symposium on Emotion will be held April 23-24 at Monona Terrace Convention Center. The them of this year’s symposium is “Affect and Plasticity: Neural Mechanisms Underlying Emotional Change.”

About 300 scientists and students interested in answers to these questions will gather in Madison, April 23-24, for the fifth annual Wisconsin Symposium on Emotion, an international forum on the latest basic and clinical research dealing with emotion.

The theme of this year’s symposium is “Affect and Plasticity: Neural Mechanisms Underlying Emotional Change,” says Ned Kalin, director of the HealthEmotions Research Institute, which is sponsoring the symposium.

“A variety of influences – stress, prolonged emotional states, and some drugs and medications – can produce fundamental changes in brain chemicals and circuits over time. These are potentially very important phenomena that can result in long-term changes in brain function that may affect an individual’s mental and physical health,” Kalin says. “Understanding how this neuroplasticity occurs can provide important insights into potential ways to prevent and treat some of the negative effects of emotions.”

Ned Kalin

Steven Hyman, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, will launch the symposium with a public talk, Thursday, April 22, at 4 p.m. at the State Historical Society. He will speak on “The Worrisome Question of Whether There’s a Worry Gene, and Other Investigations of Genes and Behavior.”

Seven leading scientists will describe the most current research on emotional change.

Presenters include Mary Carlson, Harvard University School of Public Health; Dennis Charney, Yale University School of Medicine; Jonathan Cohen, Princeton University; Mark George, Medical University of South Carolina; Michael Meaney, McGill University; Charles Nemeroff, Emory University School of Medicine; and Terry Robinson, University of Michigan.

The symposium encourages broad student participation from across the U.S. and Canada, says Kalin, who is also chair of the Medical School psychiatry department. The institute pays travel expenses for 87 of the most highly qualified undergraduate, graduate, medical and post-graduate students interested in studying emotions.

UW–Madison graduate students enrolled in psychology seminar 711 eagerly anticipate the symposium. All semester they’ve been immersed in journal articles by scientists who will be presenting at the meeting. The students will lead discussion sessions following each expert’s talk and will be ready to ask their own well-prepared questions. They’ll also write reviews of the research presented, which will be compiled in a volume to be published after the symposium.

The Wisconsin Symposium on Emotion was first conceptualized five years ago by Richard Davidson, Vilas and William James Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, as a means to highlight research of UW faculty studying various aspects of emotion. With the support of the HealthEmotions Research Institute, the symposium has grown to become one of the most important scientific gatherings concentrating on the study of emotion.