PBS graduate student Joanne Stasiak’s ongoing work on affect-motor interactions was selected as a conference highlight datablitz in the upcoming annual meeting of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society, to take place in Santa Barbara, CA in April 26-29.

Stasiak is a second year graduate student in Dr. Lapate’s affective neuroscience lab, the LEAP Neuro lab, which investigates the neural mechanisms underlying adaptive emotional functioning and emotion-cognition interactions using behavioral, peripheral-physiological, and neuroimaging methods.

Stasiak’s project “Emotion for motion: Characterizing the open-loop pathway and amygdala-prefrontal contributions” examines the neural bases of emotion-facilitated movement. Her work, conducted in collaboration with the Grafton Action lab and funded by the Michael J Fox Foundation and the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s (ASAP) initiative, seeks to detail a little-understood pathway, the “Open Loop”, which may subserve an intriguing phenomenon observed in Parkinson’s disease, paradoxical kinesia– whereby patients are able to move fluidly under surprising or emotionally arousing circumstances. Her talk will be held on April 27th at 2:00 pm.

Congratulations, Joanne!