Caltech Magazine Spring 2022
The Wonders of Jellyfish
These ancient creatures offer insights into the ways our bodies work. They also might become our partners in the quest to slow climate change.
Recent Publications
2022
Make war not love: The neural substrate underlying a state-dependent switch in female social behavior. Neuron. ISSN 0896-6273. Liu, Mengyu and Kim, Dong-Wook and Zeng, Hongkui et al. (2022) doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2021.12.002. (In Press) https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20220104-157919000
2021
Featured Publication
New Book is Now Available
The Nature of The Beast
How Emotions Guide Us
What Can Animals Tell Us About Emotions?
Credit: Life & Work Ideas Essay What Can Animals Tell Us About Emotions? Do elephants tear up in sorrow and squirrels flee in fear, or are those just reflexes? Scientists are plumbing animals' mental states for insight into human mental health. Illustration: Vidhya Nagarajan
Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience
Dr. Anderson is the Director and Leadership Chair of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience. Learn more about the Chen Institute and Caltech.
Collaboration in Neuroscience
The Neuroscience of Emotion: A New Synthesis
The Neuroscience of Emotion presents a new framework for the neuroscientific study of emotion across species. Written by Ralph Adolphs and David J. Anderson, two leading authorities on the study of emotion, this accessible and original book recasts the discipline and demonstrates that in order to understand emotion, we need to examine its biological roots in humans and animals. Only through a comparative approach that encompasses work at the molecular, cellular, systems, and cognitive levels will we be able to comprehend what emotions do, how they evolved, how the brain shapes their development, and even how we might engineer them into robots in the future.
Showing that emotions are ubiquitous across species and implemented in specific brain circuits, Adolphs and Anderson offer a broad foundation for thinking about emotions as evolved, functionally defined biological states. The authors discuss the techniques and findings from modern neuroscientific investigations of emotion and conclude with a survey of theories and future research directions.
Featuring color illustrations throughout, The Neuroscience of Emotion synthesizes the latest in neuroscientific work to provide deeper insights into how emotions function in all of us.