Dr. Nadine Gogolla

Primary research focus: Behavioral & Cognitive Neuroscience

Second research focus: Cellular & Systems Neuroscience

Third research focus: Molecular & Developmental Neuroscience

Keywords: emotion, insular cortex, interoception, neural circuit analysis, behavioral neuroscience

Research methods: calcium imaging, electrophysiology, facial expression and postural analyses, opto- and chemogenetics, pupillometry, heart rate and breathing measurements

Research focus: The overarching aim of our research is to contribute to a biology-based understanding and definition of emotion states. Working with mice as model organism, our main questions are: How do emotion states arise in the brain? How do brain and body interact during emotion? How are emotions regulated?
Current projects involve mapping and characterizing the role of the insular cortex in emotion and interoception, investigating the contribution of bodily functions to emotion, and developing new methods to quantify and assess emotion states via multimodal (brain – behavior – bodily) expression profiling. While we mostly use the mouse as model organism, being situated at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry, we also collaborate with clinicians and are engaged in translational projects.

Current  or graduated GSN students: Michaela Junghänel (Internship and Masters thesis), Inanna Warnhoff (Internship and Masters thesis), Davide Crombie (Internship), Ot Prat (Internship), Alana Darcher (Internship),  Dr. Nejc Dolensek (internship), Sarina Karmacharya (Internships), Onur Serce, Miranda Popescu

Selected publications:

Malezieux, Klein, et al (2023) Neural circuits for emotion.
Annual Reviews Neuroscience, 46, 211-231, PMID: 36917821

Klein, et al (2021) Fear balance is maintained by bodily feedback to the insular cortex in mice.
Science 374(6570), 1010-1015. PMID: 34793231

Zych, et al (2021) Expressions of emotions across species.
Current Opinion in Neurobiology 68, 57-66 PMID: 33548631

Gehrlach, Weiand, et al (2020) A whole-brain connectivity map of mouse insular cortex.
eLife 9. PMID: 32940600

Dolensek, et al (2020) Facial expressions of emotion states and their neuronal correlates in mice.
Science 368(6486), 89-94. PMID: 32241948

Gehrlach, et al (2019) Aversive state processing in the posterior insular cortex.
Nature Neuroscience 22(9), 1424-1437. PMID: 31455886