Research team
Processing emotions
My team and I are investigating the basic neural mechanism of emotional processing in the brain and body. We are interested in how emotional relevance influences perceptual processes in the brain, the changes that occur in the body (such as heart rate), and the behavioral consequences of these changes. We are also interested in the basic mechanism of fear learning and its emotional processes.
Selected publications
Santos-Mayo A, Moratti S. How fear conditioning affects the visuocortical processing of context cues in humans. Evidence from steady state visual evoked responses. Cortex. 2025 Feb;183:21-37. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2024.11.005. Epub 2024 Nov 19. PMID: 39608048.
Moratti S, Gundlach C, de Echegaray J, Müller MM. Distinct patterns of spatial attentional modulation of steady-state visual evoked magnetic fields (SSVEFs) in subdivisions of the human early visual cortex. Psychophysiology. 2024 Feb; 61(2):e14452. doi: 10.1111/psyp.14452. Epub 2023 Oct 3. PMID: 37787386.
Weidner EM, Moratti S, Schindler S, Grewe P, Bien CG, Kissler J. Amygdala and cortical gamma-band responses to emotional faces are modulated by attention to valence. Psychophysiology. 2024 May;61(5):e14512. doi: 10.1111/psyp.14512. Epub 2024 Jan 4. PMID: 38174584.
Abalo-Rodríguez I, Santos-Mayo A, Moratti S. Pavlovian conditioning-induced hallucinations reduce MMN amplitudes for duration but not frequency deviants. Schizophr Res. 2023 Jun;256:63-71. doi: 10.1016/j.schres.2023.04.017. Epub 2023 May 7. PMID: 37156071.
Costa M, Lozano-Soldevilla D, Gil-Nagel A, Toledano R, Oehrn CR, Kunz L, Yebra M, Mendez-Bertolo C, Stieglitz L, Sarnthein J, Axmacher N, Moratti S, Strange BA. Aversive memory formation in humans involves an amygdala-hippocampus phase code. Nat Commun. 2022 Oct 27;13(1):6403. doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-33828-2. PMID: 36302909; PMCID: PMC9613775.
