What is clinical translational neuroscience and how can it help us better understand how to help people with clinical problems?<\/strong><\/p>

Translational neuroscience is the idea of taking models, theories, and what we know about brain circuitry to help translate these into a better understanding of how clinical interventions work, whether these interventions are psychosocial, physical exercise, medication, or meditation. Fundamental to our question is what are the brain patterns associated with psychological dysregulation, how are the brain circuits modified, and how will that predict who will and won\u2019t benefit from certain types of interventions. In essence, can we take functional brain patterns to help us understand the underlying mechanisms more clearly and modify current interventions to make them more effective?<\/p>

For example, if you know that working memory is essential for certain clinical interventions and you know a certain subset of the population is not using their working memory efficiently, can they be trained on a task that increases different parts of the frontal-parietal cortical brain network that support attention and memory and subsequently make cognitive behavioral therapy, more effective? That is the translation from the neuroscience of core brain circuitry to what influences clinical interventions with the hope that the interventions become more effective.<\/p>

One research topic I\u2019m pursuing is the different forms of emotional regulation. There are various forms of emotional regulation such as suppressing what you’re feeling, distracting your attention, redirecting your attention in a goal-oriented way, perspective-taking, or even taking a compassionate orientation, which is also one type of cognitive appraisal. So you can imagine assessing current ability in these many domains and then seeing where they are weak, and then giving patients a sequence of training exercises that enhances a particular skill that is currently underdeveloped. We can potentially have several different options for training those skills and continue to assess their development.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t