Our mission
The overarching mission of our lab is to have a deep impact on the intersecting fields of clinical, affective, and personality neuroscience. To that end, we strive to perform innovative studies that can lead to significant discoveries, to disseminate our discoveries as widely as possible, and to mentor trainees to become top-notch scientists.
Most of our work—both empirical and theoretical—is focused on understanding the nature and biological bases of anxiety-related states, traits, and disorders. When extreme, anxiety contributes to a variety of debilitating, often treatment-resistant mental illnesses, including internalizing disorders, substance misuse, and psychosis. To understand the origins and course of this liability, my group uses a broad spectrum of tools—including multimodal neuroimaging (MRI, PET), psychophysiology, smartphone digital phenotyping, semi-structured clinical and life-stress interviews, and genetic analyses—in pediatric and adult patients, university students, community members, and monkeys, working closely with collaborators in the U.S., Germany, China, and South Korea. More recently established secondary lines of research are focused on psychiatric nosology and graduate-student health and wellbeing.
Clinically, our work promises to enhance our understanding of how emotional states and traits contribute to a range of psychiatric disorders, facilitate the discovery of novel intermediate phenotypes and biomarkers, and set the stage for developing more effective transdiagnostic interventions. From a basic psychological science perspective, our work begins to address fundamental questions about the nature and the origins of temperament and the interplay of emotion and cognition—questions that often cannot be addressed using traditional behavioral or psychometric measures.
Our work has been continuously supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 2016.
Dr. Shackman is reviewing Fall 2024 applications for the Clinical Psychological Science and NACS doctoral programs!
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