AREAS OF RESEARCH

Stress effects on affective control:

Emotion regulation strategies are widely known to attenuate negative affective states and control reward-seeking behavior, but these processes can be rapidly impaired by stress exposure. This line of work seeks to empirically characterize how stress shapes decisions to use goal-directed control and why these strategies are so easily compromised by stress. This includes studies investigating how stress changes tendencies to use different forms of emotional regulation and work aiming to quantify the cognitive costs imposed by using control strategies, as well as how stress changes these costs (R01MH130532).

Stress and flexible control of threat:
​

Learning to predict threats is critical to survival; however, adaptive behavior depends on the capacity to flexibly modulate threat responses as circumstances change. A major obstacle to fear regulation is the fact that aversive contexts are often marked by stress. In this line of work, we investigate how fear and safety learning is affected by different forms of stress exposure and further extend these investigations to clinical populations to identify how neurophysiological mechanisms underlying threat regulation change in anxiety samples (R01AT011257). By studying how stress alters fear regulation in humans, our lab aims to better understand the mechanism underlying stress and regulation in real-world environments.

Stress and decisions involving uncertainty:

A central feature of stressors is the uncertainty and unpredictability inherent in these experiences; thus, it has been proposed that stress may alter decisions involving uncertainty. In this line of work, we investigate how different forms of uncertainty are evaluated after stress exposure by assessing stress effects on learning processes (e.g., reinforcement learning, foraging behavior), on appraisals of emotional ambiguity (e.g., valence bias) and on tolerance for economic uncertainty (e.g., risk/ambiguity aversion). The goal in investigating these processes is to target computational and neural mechanisms that drive stress reactivity and uncertainty intolerance to promote more adaptive behavior.

CURRENT STUDIES

Stress effects on self-control costs (R01MH130532)
​

Failures of self-control carry profound costs to individuals and society. A growing body of work suggests that these decisions are not simply failures of “willpower,” but reflect the fact that exercising control is inherently costly to individuals. Stressful experiences, whether physiological or psychosocial in nature, can exacerbate these costs by impairing prefrontal circuits that support goal-directed control while simultaneously increasing the salience of temptation. This imbalance can shift cost-benefit decisions that govern the use of goal-directed control. Using behavioral economic approaches coupled with in-lab stress manipulations, neuroendocrine assays and neuroimaging tools, our lab seeks to measure the “cost” of self-control under stress, identify the neural circuits that underlie these costs, and ultimately uncover mechanisms that can promote resilience against maladaptive choices in high-stress contexts. 

PARTICIPATE

Neural mechanisms of mindfulness-based



​stress reduction in anxiety




(R01AT011257) 

Stress and anxiety can impair the functional integrity of the neural circuits underlying threat-learning and extinction. Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is one strategy that has shown clinical effectiveness in reducing anxiety symptoms, but less is known about the neurobiological mechanisms through which MBSR achieves this. This line of work uses clinical, psychophysiological and neuroimaging approaches to examine how MBSR affects anxiety symptoms in patients with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and how these responses are represented in core threat learning and regulation circuits.

Participate