Florin Dolcos, Ph.D.

Florin Dolcos is a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a full-time faculty member at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology.
He performed his Ph.D. research in cognitive and affective neurosciences at the University of Alberta’s Centre for Neuroscience and Duke University’s Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, and his postdoctoral training in cognitive, affective, and clinical neurosciences at Duke University’s Brain Imaging and Analysis Center. Dolcos joined the University of Illinois following an assistant professor appointment in the University of Alberta’s Department of Psychiatry.
Research 
Dolcos researches the neural correlates of affective-cognitive interactions in healthy and clinical populations, as studied with brain imaging techniques such as functional MRI and ERP. His program can be divided into the following main directions:

Neural Mechanisms Underlying the Impact of Emotion on Cognition. 
This direction investigates the mechanisms underlying the enhancing and impairing effects of emotion on various cognitive/executive processes (perception, attention, working memory, episodic memory, decision making). A novel direction emerging from this research investigates the neural mechanisms linking and dissociating the opposing effects of emotion. This is important because they tend to co-occur in both healthy functioning and clinical conditions. For instance, enhanced distraction produced by task-irrelevant emotional information can also lead to better memory for the distracters themselves. Also, enhanced memory for traumatic events in PTSD can also lead to impaired cognition due to increased emotional distractibility.

2. Neural Mechanisms Underlying the Impact of Cognition on Emotion. 
The impact of cognition on emotion is typically exerted as cognitive control of emotion, or emotion regulation. This direction is corollary to my first direction, and is important to pursue, because optimal cognitive control of emotional responses is a key component of healthy emotional behavior, whereas maladaptive regulation strategies constitute a core feature of affective disorders. Thus, in our studies we also manipulate emotion regulation strategies (e.g., suppression, reappraisal, attentional deployment), to investigate the regulatory mechanisms mediating the beneficial or detrimental impact of emotion on cognition.

3. Neural Mechanisms of Emotion-Cognition Interactions in Social Contexts. 
My research also targets mechanisms of emotion-cognition interactions in social contexts. This newly emerging direction in my research program is also important, because proper processing and interpretation of emotional social cues are key components of successful social behavior. Therefore, we are also investigating the neural mechanisms of processing emotional information as social cues, and of their impact on behavior.

4. The Role of Individual Differences in Emotion-Cognition Interactions. 
Although the first three lines of research have clear clinical relevance, it is important to also directly investigate the very same issues in clinical cohorts. Therefore, my research program also includes collaborations with clinical researchers that investigate neural mechanisms of emotion-cognition interactions in patients with mood and anxiety disorders (depression, PTSD), as well as investigation of changes associated with therapeutic interventions. Investigation of individual differences, however, is important not only for understanding clinical conditions, but also for integrative understanding of the factors that influence individual variation in the vulnerability to, or resilience against, emotional and cognitive challenges leading to disturbances. Thus, in my research, I have also investigated the role of gender, age, personality, and genetic differences in emotion-cognition interactions. Especially relevant are emerging large-scale studies using comprehensive behavior-personality-brain approaches emphasizing integrative understanding that is critical for the development of training and preventive programs aimed to increase resilience and reduce vulnerability to emotional disturbances.