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.