James Ranni's Profile

We are interested in both risk and resilience - why are some individuals
particularly vulnerable in response to negative life events, while others appear
to be relatively resilient? And how can we promote enhanced resilience? As a
part of the latter work, we study interventions designed to cultivate more
positive affective styles. One such intervention that we have extensively
studied over the past decade is meditation.

In addition to the research on normal affective function, we also study a
range of psychopathologies, all of which involve abnormalities in different
aspects of emotion processing. Included among the disorders we have recently
studied are adult mood and anxiety disorders, and autism, fragile X and Williams
syndrome in children. Some of our current research involves:

• Voluntary and automatic emotion regulation.
• Resilience in aging.
• Interactions between emotion and cognitive function, particularly working
  memory and attention.
• Temperament in children, in hopes of determining early signs of
  vulnerability to psychopathology.
• Social and emotional processing differences in children and adults with
  autism and fragile X.
• Mood and anxiety disorders.
• The impact of pharmaco-therapy and psychotherapy on brain function in
  patients with mood and anxiety disorders.
• The effects of meditation on brain function in adept practitioners and
  novices.
• Relations between neural mechanisms of emotion and peripheral measures of
  inflammation and lung function in asthma.