Rate My Professor Neil McNaughton

Emeritus Professor Neil McNaughton is a longstanding member of the Department of Psychology at the University of Otago. Holding an MA from Oxford University and a PhD from the University of Southampton, he possesses over 50 years of neuroscience research experience in the UK, Canada, and New Zealand, complemented by more than 40 years of teaching at graduate and undergraduate levels. He joined the department in 1982 and has been instrumental in establishing neuroscience at Otago, serving as director of the country's only undergraduate Neuroscience programme from 1991 to 2008, the Neuroscience Research Centre from 1991 to 1997, and the Neural Systems Structure and Function Research Theme from 1997 to 2005. Additionally, he was treasurer of the Australasian Winter Conference on Brain Research from 1983 to 1997 and a committee member until 2009. McNaughton has acted as external assessor for personal chairs, awards, courses, and promotions at institutions such as the Australian National University, University of Auckland, and University of Hong Kong. He has refereed grants for 23 grant-awarding bodies, papers for 110 journals, and books for 5 publishers. He is on the Editorial Advisory Board of Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews and a founding member of the Editorial Board of Personality Neuroscience. In 2014, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi (FRSNZ).

McNaughton's multidisciplinary research spans affective, behavioural, pharmacological, cognitive, and personality neuroscience. He examines the neurobiology of state and trait anxiety and temporal-frontal lobe interactions, combining psychological analyses of emotion and memory with physiological studies of hippocampal "theta" rhythms in rats and humans. By leveraging anxiolytic drugs, he bridges psychological and physiological analyses, extending findings to clinical contexts. His current focus includes translating results into a human anxiety biomarker sensitive to goal conflict, identifying its neural sources with fMRI, developing clinical tests, and investigating links to ketamine's treatment of "treatment-resistant" anxiety disorders. He has authored over 150 papers, 7 major reviews, 32 book chapters, and 2 books—including The Neuropsychology of Anxiety: an enquiry into the functions of the septo-hippocampal system (3rd edition, Oxford University Press, 2024; 2nd edition, 2000 with Jeffrey A. Gray) and Biology and Emotion (Cambridge University Press, 1989)—and edited 5 book-length works. Notable publications include "A two-dimensional neuropsychology of defense: fear/anxiety and defensive distance" (2004, cited over 1700 times). His work has profoundly shaped theories in anxiety, personality, and reinforcement sensitivity.