John Herrington

Emotion and Neurodiversity Laboratory

The Emotion and Neurodiversity Laboratory studies how neurotypical and neurodivergent individuals understand and experience their emotions. Autistic children and adolescents experience anxiety and depression at much higher rates than the neurotypical population, for reasons we do not fully understand. Our studies leverage cognitive neuroscience to address this problem - by identifying possibile linkages, and points of divergence, between the neurobiology of autism, and that of anxiety and mood disorders. Our research also examines how anxiety and depression may appear fundamentally differently among autistic individuals, and in ways that may be difficulty to detect. A further goal of this research is to identify whether many of the behaviors and neurobiological profiles traditionally associated with autism may be better understood in terms of emotion processes, as opposed to more traditional, deficit-based models of social difficulty.