Ryan Smith, Ph.D.

Associate Investigator, Laureate Institute for Brain Research
Email: rsmith@laureateinstitute.org 


​Research Approach

Dr. Smith’s main research interests include understanding how conscious and unconscious emotion-related processes are realized within the brain, and in how these processes may be altered in mood and anxiety disorders. The primary research methods Dr. Smith employs in his research are neuroimaging and computational modeling. A major overarching focus is to characterize differences between mentally healthy and unhealthy individuals with the goal of improving diagnosis and treatment selection within psychiatry and clinical psychology.


​Research Program Highlights

Main Questions
How does the brain generate emotions, and how do we subsequently recognize and become aware of our own emotions? Can these processes be understood in terms of the computational processes performed by the brain? How might these computational processes be affected in psychiatric disorders? Could understanding these mechanisms improve treatment?

Approach
We employ several methods aimed at providing multiple levels of description in characterizing emotion-related psychological and biological processes, including self-reported experience, behavioral and physiological responses, functional neuroimaging, and computational modeling.

​Future Directions
We aim to establish (1) the role of conscious and unconscious emotional processes in psychiatric disorders at a cognitive, computational, and neurobiological level of description, (2) how such processes contribute to the vulnerability to, and the onset and maintenance of psychiatric symptoms, and (3) how characterizing such processes in individual participants might inform more individualized and targeted treatment selection.

Scientific Background

Dr. Smith received his Bachelor’s degree in the science of Psychology from Arizona State University in 2010. He subsequently completed three graduate degrees from the University of Arizona between 2011 and 2015. This included Master’s degrees in Neuroscience and in Philosophy (with a focus on Philosophy of Science and Mind), and a Ph.D. in Psychology (with a Cognitive Neuroscience focus). His graduate work in philosophy focused on the relationship between scientific explanation and understanding and on the relationship between physical and mental processes. This work was done primarily under the supervision of Jenann Ismael, who is a recognized leader in the fields of Philosophy of Cognitive Science and Philosophy of Physics. His graduate work in Neuroscience/Psychology focused on the role of prefrontal cortex in emotion and its pathology in Major Depression, using both structural and functional neuroimaging as well as measurement of heart rate variability. This work was done primarily under the supervision of Dr. Richard Lane, who is both a practicing psychiatrist and a recognized pioneer in studying the brain basis of emotion.
 
Dr. Smith subsequently completed a 3-year postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. W.D. Scott Killgore in the Psychiatry Department within the University of Arizona College of Medicine. During this fellowship he designed and ran a neuroimaging study focused on understanding the ability to hold emotional information within working memory. He also played a primary role in creating an online emotional intelligence training program designed to minimize the development of emotional disorders in military personel.

Upon completing this postdoctoral fellowship, Dr. Smith accepted an associate investigator position at LIBR, following completion of a four-month visiting fellowship with Dr. Karl Friston at University College London. This fellowship focused on designing computational models of brain function for use in understanding emotions and mechanisms underlying psychopathology.
 
Currently, Dr. Smith has authored over 80 publications within peer-reviewed journals and scholarly books, based in part on the work described above. Many of these publications have also made theoretical contributions, proposing neurocognitive and computational models of conscious/unconscious emotion, neurovisceral integration, emotional intelligence, and depression.

Selected Publications

Smith, R., Allen, J. J., Thayer, J. F., & Lane, R. D. (2015). Altered functional connectivity between medial prefrontal cortex and the inferior brainstem in major depression during appraisal of subjective emotional responses: A preliminary study. Biol Psychol, 108, 13-24. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2015.03.007
Smith, R., Braden, B. B., Chen, K., Ponce, F. A., Lane, R. D., & Baxter, L. C. (2015). The neural basis of attaining conscious awareness of sad mood. Brain Imaging Behav, 9(3), 574-587. doi:10.1007/s11682-014-9318-8
Smith, R., & Lane, R. D. (2015). The neural basis of one's own conscious and unconscious emotional states. Neurosci Biobehav Rev, 57, 1-29. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2015.08.003
Smith, R., Alkozei, A., Lane, R. D., & Killgore, W. D. S. (2016). Unwanted reminders: The effects of emotional memory suppression on subsequent neuro-cognitive processing. Conscious Cogn, 44, 103-113. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2016.07.008
Smith, R., & Lane, R. D. (2016). Unconscious emotion: A cognitive neuroscientific perspective. Neurosci Biobehav Rev, 69, 216-238. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.08.013
Smith, R., Thayer, J. F., Khalsa, S. S., & Lane, R. D. (2017). The hierarchical basis of neurovisceral integration. Neurosci Biobehav Rev, 75, 274-296. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2017.02.003
Smith, R., Lane, R. D., Parr, T., & Friston, K. J. (2019). Neurocomputational mechanisms underlying emotional awareness: insights afforded by deep active inference and their potential clinical relevance. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.09.002
Smith, R., Lane, R. D., Alkozei, A., Bao, J., Smith, C., Sanova, A., Killgore, W. D. S. (2017). Maintaining the feelings of others in working memory is associated with activation of the left anterior insula and left frontal-parietal control network. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci, 12(5), 848-860. doi:10.1093/scan/nsx011
Smith, R., Alkozei, A., Bao, J., Smith, C., Lane, R. D., & Killgore, W. D. S. (2017). Resting state functional connectivity correlates of emotional awareness. Neuroimage, 159, 99-106. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.07.044
Smith, R., Alkozei, A., & Killgore, W. D. S. (2017). Contributions of self-report and performance-based individual differences measures of social cognitive ability to large-scale neural network functioning. Brain Imaging Behav, 11(3), 685-697. doi:10.1007/s11682-016-9545-2
Smith, R., Alkozei, A., Killgore, W. D. S., & Lane, R. D. (2018). Nested positive feedback loops in the maintenance of major depression: An integration and extension of previous models. Brain Behav Immun, 67, 374-397. doi:10.1016/j.bbi.2017.09.011
Smith, R., Lane, R. D., Alkozei, A., Bao, J., Smith, C., Sanova, A., Killgore, W. D. S. (2018). The role of medial prefrontal cortex in the working memory maintenance of one's own emotional responses. Sci Rep, 8(1), 3460. doi:10.1038/s41598-018-21896-8
Smith, R., Killgore, W. D. S., Alkozei, A., & Lane, R. D. (2018). A neuro-cognitive process model of emotional intelligence. Biol Psychol, 139, 131-151. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2018.10.012
Smith, R., Killgore, W. D. S., & Lane, R. D. (2018). The structure of emotional experience and its relation to trait emotional awareness: A theoretical review. Emotion, 18(5), 670-692. doi:10.1037/emo0000376
Smith, R., Bajaj, S., Dailey, N. S., Alkozei, A., Smith, C., Sanova, A., Killgore, W. D. S. (2018). Greater cortical thickness within the limbic visceromotor network predicts higher levels of trait emotional awareness. Conscious Cogn, 57, 54-61. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2017.11.004
Smith, R., Lane, R. D., Sanova, A., Alkozei, A., Smith, C., & Killgore, W. D. S. (2018). Common and Unique Neural Systems Underlying the Working Memory Maintenance of Emotional vs. Bodily Reactions to Affective Stimuli: The Moderating Role of Trait Emotional Awareness. Front Hum Neurosci, 12, 370. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2018.00370
Smith, R., Sanova, A., Alkozei, A., Lane, R. D., & Killgore, W. D. S. (2018). Higher levels of trait emotional awareness are associated with more efficient global information integration throughout the brain: a graph-theoretic analysis of resting state functional connectivity. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci, 13(7), 665-675. doi:10.1093/scan/nsy047
Smith, R., Weihs, K. L., Alkozei, A., Killgore, W. D. S., & Lane, R. D. (2019). An Embodied Neurocomputational Framework for Organically Integrating Biopsychosocial Processes: An Application to the Role of Social Support in Health and Disease. Psychosom Med, 81(2), 125-145. doi:10.1097/PSY.0000000000000661

Research Collaborators

Karl Friston
University College London
Maxwell Ramstead
McGill University
Jesse Hoey
​University of Waterloo
Julian Thayer
​The Ohio State University
Phillip Schwartenbeck
University College London
Karen Weihs
​University of Arizona
Thomas Parr 
​University College London
Casper Hesp
​University of Amsterdam
Paul Badcock
​University of Melbourne
Richard Lane
​University of Arizona
Michael Mouttoussis
University College London
​Quentin Huys
​University College London
W.D. Scott Killgore
​University of Arizona
Horst Dieter Steklis
​University of Arizona
Edda Bilek
​University College London