Clinical Faculty

Student applicants to clinical doctoral program:

I will be accepting new graduate students for the Fall 2009 semester.

Brain mechanisms that underlie individual differences in cognitive and affective processing relevant to psychopathology. A primary focus is on cognitive-executive and regulatory deficits underlying impulse control (externalizing) problems such as substance use/abuse, antisocial behavior, and psychopathy. Methodologically, this work employs advanced time-frequency decomposition techniques with EEG/MEG signals. This includes amplitude measures that can delineate active brain regions and functional connectivity measures to characterize dynamic communication among areas. Integration of these EEG/MEG decomposition approaches with MRI/fMRI is currently being advanced.

Current projects investigate these phenomena within undergraduate, community, and incarcerated offender populations. The goal is to make inferences about brain function and externalizing psychopathology that span the range of human behavior.

Peer-Reviewed Papers

*Jiang, Y., Shannon, R.W., Vizueta, N., Bernat, E.M., Patrick, C.J., and He, S. (in press). Dynamics of processing invisible faces in the brain: Automatic neural encoding of facial expression information. Neuroimage.

*Vaidyanathan, U., Patrick, C.J., Bernat, E.M. (in press). Startle reflex potentiation during aversive picture viewing as an indicator of trait fear. Psychophysiology.

Bernat, E.M., Malone, S.M., Williams, W.J., Patrick, C.J., and Iacono, W.G. (2007). Decomposing delta, theta, and alpha time-frequency ERP activity from a visual oddball task using PCA. International Journal of Psychophysiology,64(1), 62-74.

Bernat, E., Hall, J., Steffen, B., and Patrick, C.J. (2007). Violent offending predicts P300 amplitude. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 66, 161-167.

*Hall, R.J., Bernat, E.M., and Patrick, C.J. (2007). Externalizing psychopathology and the error-related negativity. Psychological Science, 18(4), 326-33.

*Hicks, B.M., Bernat, E.M.,Malone, S.M., Iacono, W.G., Patrick, C.J., Kruieger R.F., & Mcgue M. (2007). Genes mediate the association between P300 amplitude and externalizing disorders. Psychophysiology, 44, 98-105.

Patrick, C.J., Bernat E., Malone S.M., Iacono W.G., Krueger, R.F., and McGue, M. (2006). P300 amplitude as a marker of externalizing in adolescent males. Psychophysiology, 43(1), 84-92.

Bernat, E., Patrick, C.J., and Benning, S., and Tellegen, A. (2006). Thematic content and affective intensity: Modulation of startle reflex, electromyogram, heart rate, and skin conductance. Psychophysiology, 43(1), 93-103.

Bernat, E., Williams, W.J., and Gehring, W. (2005). Decomposing ERP time-frequency energy using PCA. Clinical Neurophysiology, 116, 1314-1334.

Conference Papers

Bernat, E.M., Nelson, L.D., Holroyd, C.B., Gehring, W.J., and Patrick, C.J. (2008). Separating cognitive processes with principal components analysis of EEG time-frequency distributions. Proc. SPIE Vol. 7074, 70740S.

Aviyente, S., Evans, W., Bernat, E. and Sponheim, S. (2007). A time-varying phase coherence measure for quantifying functional integration in the brain, Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing, 2007. Proc. IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), 4, 1169-1172.

Aviyente, S., Bernat, E.M., Malone, S.M., and Iacono, W.G. (2006). Analysis of event related potentials using PCA and matching pursuit on the time-frequency plane, Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2006. EMBS '06. 28th Annual International Conference of the IEEE, 2454-2457.