A hearty congrats to Shannon Grogans, who successfully proposed her master’s thesis!

Shannon’s project is focused on understanding the neural systems underlying trait-like individual differences in dispositional negativity, a prominent risk factor for anxiety disorders, depression, and a host of other adverse outcomes. A secondary focus of her project is to determine whether different experimental probes of extended amygdala function are interchangeable. This is an important question because it is widely assumed that different ‘threat’ tasks— from viewing photographs of fearful faces to waiting to receive a painful electric shock—provide equivalent measures of amygdala reactivity, an assumption that has led large on-going biobank studies to adopt the more convenient faces approach. We wish her the best of luck as she begins this new chapter of her professional training.

A hearty congrats to Kathryn DeYoung, who submitted her Master’s thesis!

Katie’s project leveraged survey data collected from 187,000 respondents over an 11 year span to provide the most compelling evidence to date that graduate school confers heightened risk for emotional distress, emotional disorders, and suicidality. Her results also make it clear that the prevalence of these problems has increased over the past decade. Using data gleaned from the NSDUH survey, an annual randomized household interview study of mental illness, she rigorously demonstrates that American graduate students are more likely to experience depression and suicidality than their demographically matched peers, and that this discrepancy has worsened since 2008. In sum, her results paint a worrisome portrait of the state of graduate student mental health in the United States, with important implications for the full spectrum of stakeholders, from students and faculty to administrators and funders. We wish Kathryn the best of luck with the coming oral defense.

December , 2020 update: She passed! Thesis accepted with minimal revisions!

New research from the lab focused on understanding the neural circuits underlying fear and anxiety was featured in Smithsonian magazine.