A set of experiments will investigate the effect of mood manipulated by effective happy vs. sad mood-induction procedures on neural processes of attention and decision-making. The attentional-blink task will be used to reveal potential interactions between mood and the processing of subliminally presented emotional words; a gambling task will be used to probe the processing of error signals under different mood states. The long-term aim is to identify cognitive tasks that act as markers of mood for the eventual treatment of depressed patients by deep brain stimulation (Funded by the Collisson Foundation).

Steele, J.D., Kumar, P., and Ebmeier, K.P. (2007) Blunted response to feedback information in depressive illness. Brain 130, 2367-2374