Jorge Armony PhD
- Division:Human Neuroscience

6875 Boulevard LaSalle
Montréal, QC
H4H 1R3
Researcher, Douglas Research Centre
Associate Professor, Department of Psychiatry, McGill University
Emotions, fMRI, PTSD
Much of our current understanding of stress-related disorders – including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), phobias, panic attack, and generalized anxiety – comes from studying how the brain processes fear.
Jorge Armony, PhD conducts research on how the brain detects stimuli in the environment that may signal threat or danger, and how this mechanism interacts with other processes, such as consciousness, attention, and memory.
In his quest for answers, Jorge Armony uses several state-of-the-art research techniques, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), behavioral and physiological measures (i.e. skin conductance and heart rate), as well as computational modeling.
He has made significant contributions toward the understanding of psychiatric disorders involving dysfunctions of the fear system. For example, Jorge Armony recently found behavioural and anatomical correlates for the modulation of spatial attention by emotion using a fear conditioning paradigm. These findings further characterized the role of the amygdala in fear processing, as well as defining selective roles for the frontal, parietal, and lateral orbitofrontal cortices in spatial attention.
Jorge Armony Laboratory
The lab uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the neural bases of human emotional processing.
The lab's members look at how the detection of environmental stimuli (that signal impending danger) may interact with other brain processes, such as attention, memory and awareness.
This research should be particularly relevant for the understanding of certain anxiety disorders, especially PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder).
Research Projects
- Neural bases of emotion-attention interactions in humans
J. Armony - A neurocognitive investigation of the recovery process in PTSD
J. Armony, A. Brunet - Perception of emotional non-speech vocalizations
J. Armony, P. Belin, S. Fecteau - Influence of emotional expression on memory for faces
J. Armony, M. Lepage, K. Sergerie - Processing of “unseen” emotional stimuli in hemispherectomized patients
J. Armony, S. Leh, A. Ptito - Computational models of emotion
J. Armony, E. Law, D. Precup
Undergraduate student
Jen Barrett, PhD
jennifer.a.barrett@mail.mcgill.ca
Graduate Student
Erin Dickie
erin.dickie@mail.mcgill.ca
Sandra Leh, MSc
sandra_leh@hotmail.com
Karine Sergerie, MSc
karine.sergerie@douglas.mcgill.ca
Other lab: Laboratory of Martin Lepage, PhD
Undergraduate student
Caroline Chochol
cchoch@po-box.mcgill.ca
Karin Pietruska
arin.pietruska@douglas.mcgill.ca
Research staff
Rina Zelmann
rina.zelmann@douglas.mcgill.ca
Recent publications
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Influence of emotional prosody, content, and repetition on memory recognition of speaker identity. Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2021;74(7):1185-1201.
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Rapid hippocampal plasticity supports motor sequence learning. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2020;117(38):23898-23903.
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Improving Spatial Normalization of Brain Diffusion MRI to Measure Longitudinal Changes of Tissue Microstructure in the Cortex and White Matter. J Magn Reson Imaging. 2020;52(3):766-775.
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Multivariate fMRI pattern analysis of fear perception across modalities. Eur J Neurosci. 2018.
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Singing in the brain: Neural representation of music and voice as revealed by fMRI. Hum Brain Mapp. 2018.
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Differing Time of Onset of Concurrent TMS-fMRI during Associative Memory Encoding: A Measure of Dynamic Connectivity. Front Hum Neurosci. 2017;11:404.
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Effects of musical expertise on oscillatory brain activity in response to emotional sounds. Neuropsychologia. 2017;103:96-105.
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Optimal measurements of hemodynamic response latency in fNIRS using the jackknife approach. Psychophysiology. 2017;54(1):62-73.
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Early selectivity for vocal and musical sounds: electrophysiological evidence from an adaptation paradigm. Eur J Neurosci. 2016;44(10):2786-2794.
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Human amygdala activation during rapid eye movements of rapid eye movement sleep: an intracranial study. J Sleep Res. 2016;25(5):576-582.
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Emotion regulation in bipolar disorder type I: an fMRI study. Psychol Med. 2015;45(12):2521-31.
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The specificity of neural responses to music and their relation to voice processing: an fMRI-adaptation study. Neurosci Lett. 2015;593:35-9.
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Neural overlap in processing music and speech. Philos Trans R Soc Lond, B, Biol Sci. 2015;370(1664):20140090.
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Time course of the influence of musical expertise on the processing of vocal and musical sounds. Neuroscience. 2015;290:175-84.
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Fear across the senses: brain responses to music, vocalizations and facial expressions. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2015;10(3):399-407.
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Neural activity related to self-initiating elaborative semantic encoding in associative memory. Neuroimage. 2013;67:273-82.
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Emotional face processing and flat affect in schizophrenia: functional and structural neural correlates. Psychol Med. 2011;41(9):1833-44.