A hearty congratulations to our former postbac, Samiha Islam, on successfully defending her 3-study dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania under the mentorship of Sara Jaffee, and on learning that she was accepted into the clinical internship program at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Mazel tov!!

Congrats to Shannon Grogans, graduate student recipient of the Department of Psychology’s 2024 Open Science Impactor Award. Shannon is being recognized for a collection of open science activities that she undertook for her Master’s thesis, which is currently under review at the Journal of Neuroscience. The list of activities is truly impressive and include, preregistration, sharing of unthresholded statistical maps on NeuroVault (a publicly accessible repository), posting of ROI level data on OSF, and continual updating of her preprint on bioRxiv. In addition, Shannon has been careful to document and share all deviations from her pre-registration plan, ensuring transparent and complete reporting of her results.

Congrats to Dr. Melissa Stockbridge, an alum of the lab, who recently secured her first faculty position in the Department of Neurology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Assistant Professor | Neurology, Cerebrovascular Division
School of Medicine
Johns Hopkins University

We are hiring a full-time postbaccalaureate research assistant (RA) to support our on-going NIMH and NIAAA studies. Read all about the position and living in the DMV here.

Updated April 30, 2024 — :We are currently reviewing applications and scheduling interviews. We are not accepting any additional applications at this time.

Like so many other scholarly, scientific, and medical disciplines, clinical psychology is often insular and inward facing, siloed off from the tools and conceptual frameworks of other scientific communities. Dr. Shackman is thrilled to serve as Guest Co-Editor of a special issue of Clinical Psychological Science focused on the challenges and opportunities of this often vexing, but rewarding endeavor. The Co-Editors need your help, in the form of illustrative empirical reports as well as more conceptual mini-reviews and opinion pieces. You need not be a bona fide clinical psychologist to participate! Psychiatrists, experimental psychopathologists, and other edge cases are welcome! Learn more at https://www.psychologicalscience.org/…/call_for…

Congratulations to Dr. Jason Smith, recipient of the 2023 Provost’s Excellence Award for Professional Track Faculty. The award honor’s Dr. Smith’s many behind-the-scenes contributions to the University of Maryland neuroimaging community, to the Shackman and Blanchard labs, and to many other faculty and trainees at Maryland and other institutions in the US and abroad.

Read all about it here

Join us for a fun- and fact-filled Sunday morning continuing education (CE) event organized by the The Association of Practicing Psychologists: Montgomery – Prince George’s Counties and featuring none other than our very own, Dr. Shackman. Learn more about the event here.

A huge congrats to Shannon Grogans, who received a very fundable 1st percentile score on her NIMH Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award application and was awarded the University of Maryland’s Ann G. Wylie Fellowship. Both awards will help support the final stages of her doctoral training and research, which are focused on understanding the relevance of fear- and anxiety-related brain circuits to the emergence and recurrence of pathological anxiety, depressed mood, and other internalizing symptoms in early adulthood. [05-25-2023 Update: Shannon’s F31 was funded and will begin in August 2023! She was compelled to decline the Wylie as a consequence.]

The lab was awarded a 5-year, $3M award from the NIAAA.

Alcohol misuse is a leading cause of human misery, morbidity, and mortality. Existing treatments are far from curative. While the roots of alcohol misuse are complex and multifactorial, Anxiety plays a key role. Models of addiction suggest that many drinkers misuse alcohol to relieve excess anxiety (‘self-medicate’). Yet the factors governing anxiety-fueled alcohol misuse remain incompletely understood.

This project will use a combination of techniques—including functional neuroimaging, computational modeling, and smartphone digital phenotyping—in a racially diverse sample drawn from the surrounding community to

• Identify the brain regions and facets of threat uncertainty most relevant to variation in alcohol use, symptoms, and problems
• Pinpoint potentially modifiable psychosocial factors that trigger alcohol craving and consumption
• Determine the neural systems most relevant to anxiety-fueled alcohol misuse in the real world

In sum, alcohol use disorder and risky drinking, more generally, are notoriously heterogeneous, with thousands of unique clinical presentations. By focusing on a theoretically coherent set of dimensional measures in a diverse, clinically relevant sample, this project has the potential to overcome this barrier and provide fresh insights into the neurocomputational factors governing anxiety-fueled alcohol misuse. Building on well-established neuroeconomic models and a fruitful line of psychophysiological research, this study will provide a potentially transformative opportunity to identify new treatment targets; guide the development of new translational models; and inform the development of new digital interventions.

This project represents a collaboration between the Shackman laboratory and investigators at the University of Wisconsin—Madison (Dr. John Curtin) and University of California, Davis (Drs. Drew Fox and Erie Boorman).

We’re hiring! Learn more about the postdoc position here.

Our NIMH-sponsored project focused on understanding the nature and neurobiology of paranoia was recently featured in a piece at Maryland Today. You can learn more about the project here.

We’re hiring! Learn more about the Study Coordinator position here.

A hearty congratulations to Shannon Grogans, who successfully completed her qualifying examination (“TIE Project”) and is now poised to propose her dissertation. Well done, Shannon!

Congratulations to Dr. Jason Smith on his well-deserved promotion to Associate Research Professor! Jason is truly exceptional and genuinely deserving of this promotion. He is a wonderful scientific partner and has made many important contributions to the Department of Psychology and the larger University of Maryland (UMD) neuroimaging community.

Jason has served as Director of Imaging Science in the Shackman Lab since 2014. In that time, he has played a leadership role, spearheading multiple research projects and grants, and providing thoughtful mentorship and training to students and faculty. Jason is hardworking, productive, creative, generous with his technical expertise, and scientifically rigorous. He is always willing to pitch in, whether that be volunteering to drive from his home in Bethesda to College Park for a crucial scanning session, submitting to multiple rounds of COVID testing to keep a sponsored project running through a global pandemic, or hosting a lab holiday party at his home.

Bringing Home the Bacon. At the time of his tenure review, Jason had served as a Co-Investigator, staff scientist, or consultant on millions of dollars of sponsored research projects led by UMD faculty (Blanchard, Dougherty, Hamilton, and Shackman), including 5 current NIH R01 awards and 4 prior awards. He also served as a Co-Investigator on 5 other R01 applications that were ultimately not funded.

An Inventive Scientist. Rachael Tillman’s master’s thesis is a classic example of Jason’s scientific ingenuity and support for clinical students (Tillman et al HBM 2018). The project leveraged publicly available fMRI data collected by Mike Milham’s group at the Nathan Kline Institute (Rockland sample). These data posed a number of unexpected technical challenges (e.g. how to optimally process idiosyncratically “de-faced” T1w anatomical scans), and Jason devised thoughtful solutions to each. Indeed, this project motivated him to further refine and optimize the MRI data processing pipeline used by my lab. Variants of Jason’s best-practices pipeline have since been adopted by a number of UMD labs, and Jason’s informal technical guidance influenced the development of fmriprep, an increasingly popular canned pipeline for fMRI data processing and quality control. He also recently organized a technical workshop, focused on quality control for fMRI, at the Czech National Institute of Mental Health.

Service to the UMD Neuroimaging Community and Beyond. Jason played a central role in the installation of the eye tracker and the electrical stimulator (‘shocker’) used by multiple groups at the Maryland Neuroimaging Center (MNC). He has since provided guidance on installation, best practices, and usage to investigators at UMD, UC Davis, Yonsei University, and elsewhere. Working closely with the MNC, Jason also contributed to early testing of advanced ‘multiband’ MRI pulse sequences at the MNC, sequences that are now routinely used by most UMD imaging labs. In addition, he currently serves as the system administrator and operational manager of the NeuroImaging Back-Up Server (NIMBUS), a secure off-site storage resource that services a number of UMD investigators (Bernat, Blanchard, Fox, Gard, Hamilton, Redcay, Riggins, and Shackman). Jason played a central role in establishing NIMBUS, which represents a collaborative partnership between the Shackman Lab, the Division of Information Technology (DIT), and the Office of Academic Computing Services (OACS). This involved innumerable emails and meetings with all of the various stakeholders. NIMBUS has allowed campus investigators to systematically back-up their imaging data, in some cases for the first time, while avoiding the high fees associated with alternative approaches, saving them tens of thousands of dollars.

Training & Mentorship. Jason is an outstanding trainer and mentor, and has played a crucial unsung role in numerous student projects, including 3 dissertations (McCarthy, Bradshaw, and Tillman), 3 master’s theses (Kaplan, Tillman, and Grogans), a NACS First Year Project (Kim), 2 senior theses, and multiple fellowship applications and awards (e.g. NSF GRF, NSF Combine, Wylie Dissertation Award). Jason has provided informal guidance and mentorship to graduate students in other labs and departments; to junior faculty, as they set up new imaging labs; and to senior faculty, as they embark on their first neuroimaging projects. He has also personally trained a half dozen full-time postbaccalaureate research assistants and dozens of undergraduate research assistants.

Conclusion. In sum, Dr. Jason Smith is an outstanding Research Scientist and has played a crucial role in our lab’s success and that of many other faculty and trainees on and off campus. He’s an exceptional contributor and one of the behind-the-scenes heroes of the college. Congrats on this well-deserved recognition!

Please join us for several upcoming presentations…

• UMD Undergraduate Research Day – Morgan Bikach will be presenting a poster on behavioral inhibition, social anxiety, and loneliness

• SoBP Annual Meeting – Shannon Grogans will be presenting a poster focused on an fMRI-EMA “fusion” project, linking vmPFC safety signaling to momentary distress in the midst of daily life

• CNS Annual Meeting – Mijon Kwon will be presenting a poster detailing some recent analyses of insula function using data from the Affective Neuroimaging Collaboratory

• SANS Annual Meeting – Alex Shackman will be presenting a short talk focused on the nature and neurobiology of anxiety

• HiTOP Annual Meeting – Alex Shackman will be moderating a symposium focused on neuroscience and nosology, what the brain means for DSM and HiTOP. Panelists include Deanna Barch, David Zald, and Lianne Schmaal. Registration is free and open to all!

• Department of Psychology, Brock University – Alex Shackman will be giving a colloquium highlighting a decade’s worth of work in the lab

• APS Annual Meeting – Shannon Grogans will be presenting a flash talk describing work aimed at understanding the relevance of the central extended amygdala to neuroticism/negative emotionality, a key risk factor for the development of anxiety disorders, depression, and other adverse outcomes

Congratulations to Shannon Grogans, who successfully proposed her TIE (Transition to Independence and Expertise) project. The TIE project is a key milestone in the clinical psychological science doctoral program at Maryland. The TIE project, which replaces the more traditional qualifying exams, serves as the gateway to the dissertation. For her TIE project, Shannon will prepare a NIH NRSA (“F31”) fellowship application focused on linking neuroimaging measures of threat-reactivity to longitudinal waves of clinical, life stress, and smartphone experience-sampling (‘EMA’) data in young adults at risk for developing anxiety disorders and depression. As part of the TIE experience, Shannon will receive structured mentorship in grant preparation from several faculty (Dougherty and Chronis-Tuscano) with successful records of NIH support. If awarded, the NRSA will provide protected time, allowing Shannon to more fully immerse herself in advanced statistical modeling and EMA techniques. Independent of the ultimate outcome of the fellowship application, the TIE project will allow her to develop a detailed blueprint for her dissertation project.

A hearty congratulations to Gloria Kim, who passed the NACS qualifying exams, opening the door to proposing her doctoral dissertation project. She’s now ABD! The interdisciplinary exams were co-chaired by Gloria’s co-supervisors, Drs. Arianna Gard and Alex Shackman.

Shannon’s pre-registered study was chosen as the winner of the first annual Reproducibility award at the annual meeting of the Society for Social Neuroscience (S4SN). Congrats, Shannon!

The central focus of the project was on clarifying the neural circuits underlying individual differences in Neuroticism/Negative Emotionality (N/NE). N/NE — the tendency to experience and express more intense, frequent, or persistent negative emotions — is a central dimension of mammalian temperament, and elevated levels of N/NE confer risk for a wide variety of adverse outcomes, from dissatisfaction and divorce to disease and premature death. The deleterious consequences of N/NE are particularly evident in the sphere of mental illness. Individuals with a more negative disposition are more likely to develop anxiety disorders and depression and, if they do, to experience more severe, chronic, and intractable symptoms. Yet the neural systems underlying trait-like individual differences in N/NE have remained enigmatic, impeding the development of more effective or tolerable interventions.

Shannon used a suite of neuroimaging and data science techniques to test the hypothesis that N/NE reflects heightened reactivity to impending threat in the central extended amygdala, including the central nucleus of the amygdala (Ce) and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BST). To ensure a broad spectrum of N/NE, 220 young adults were selectively recruited from a pool of nearly 7,000 pre-screened individuals. A multiband pulse sequence, best-practice data processing techniques, spatially unsmoothed data, anatomically defined regions-of-interest, and a cross-validated robust-regression framework enabled unbiased hypothesis testing with unprecedented anatomical resolution.

To clarify specificity, parallel analyses were performed using data from an emotional-faces paradigm. While ‘threatening’ faces are potent triggers of amygdala activity and widely used in on-going biobank projects, they do not elicit robust negative affect and are better conceptualized as a probe of emotion perception.

Results revealed that N/NE is associated with heightened BST activation during the anticipation of aversive stimulation, and this association is uniquely evident when the timing of aversive stimulation is uncertain. BST reactivity to uncertain threat remained predictive of N/NE after controlling for BST reactivity to certain threat or Ce reactivity to uncertain threat. In contrast, N/NE was unrelated to Ce activation during threat anticipation and BST/Ce reactivity to emotional faces.

While it is tempting to treat different ‘threat’ paradigms—from viewing photographs of ‘threatening’ faces to anticipating the delivery of noxious stimulation—as interchangeable probes of brain function, this has rarely been examined.

Follow-up analyses revealed no evidence of between-task convergence in the amygdala (Ce) and marginal evidence in the BST.

A large, sample and pre-registered, best-practices approach enhance confidence in the robustness and translational relevance of these results.

Together, these observations have implications for theory and practice and lay the groundwork for the longitudinal and mechanistic studies that will be necessary to determine causation and, ultimately, to develop improved interventions for extreme N/NE.

Grogans, S. E., Hur, J., Barstead, M. G., Anderson, A. S., Islam, S., Kim, H. C., Kuhn, M., Tillman, R. M., Fox, A. S., Smith, J. F., DeYoung, K. A., & Shackman, A. J. (2021). Neuroticism/negative emotionality is associated with increased reactivity to uncertain threat in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Social Neuroscience.

Congratulations to Shannon Grogans, who successfully defended her (pre-registered) Master’s thesis, entitled “Understanding the Relevance of Extended Amygdala Reactivity to Dispositional Negativity.”

As Shannon notes in the thesis, dispositional negativity—the propensity to experience and express more intense, frequent, or persistent negative affect—is a fundamental dimension of mammalian temperament. Elevated levels of dispositional negativity are associated with a wide range of practically important outcomes, from marital stability and socioeconomic attainment to anxiety disorders and depression. Yet our understanding of the brain bases of dispositional negativity remains far from complete. Converging lines of mechanistic and neuroimaging evidence suggest that dispositional negativity reflects heightened threat reactivity in the extended amygdala—a circuit encompassing the dorsal amygdala in the region of the central nucleus (Ce) and the neighboring bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BST)—and that this association may be more evident when threat is uncertain.

To address this, Shannon used a combination of approaches—including a multi-trait, multi-occasion composite of dispositional negativity and neuroimaging assays of threat anticipation and perception—to demonstrate that individuals with a more negative disposition show heightened BST activation during threat anticipation. A series of cross-validated, robust regression analyses revealed that dispositional negativity is uniquely predicted by BST reactivity to uncertain-threat anticipation. In contrast, dispositional negativity was unrelated to amygdala activation during the anticipation of threat or to extended amygdala activation during the presentation of ‘threatening’ faces.

As Shannon notes, these brain imaging observations lay the foundation for the kinds of prospective-longitudinal and mechanistic studies that will be necessary to determine causation and, ultimately, to develop improved interventions for extreme dispositional negativity.

The lab is moving! Just around a couple of corners to a larger suite of rooms in the Department of Psychology. A deep bow of gratitude to Jazmine Wedlock and Katie DeYoung for spearheading our egress, and to Mike Dougherty and Joanne Leffson-Bryant for helping with the administrative details.

Rachael Tillman — who currently is currently completing a clinical internship at Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin, Texas — has accepted a 2-year post-doctoral fellowship in Pediatric Neuropsychology at Children’s National Hospital in DC. Congrats, Rachael!

Postdoctoral Position in Affective and Clinical/Translational Neuroscience

University of Maryland, College Park, MD

Candidates are being considered for a 1-year NIMH-funded postdoctoral position in the laboratory of Dr. Alex Shackman in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland at College Park (http://shackmanlab.org/). For U.S. citizens residing in North America, we are open to this being a largely remote (‘tele-work’) position.   

The focus of this position will be to support on-going analytic and manuscript projects focused on the neurobiology of fear and anxiety and its role in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders, depression, substance abuse, and psychosis. A secondary focus will be linking variation in circuit function to thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the clinic and real-world, indexed via semi-structured interviews and smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA). In most cases, data have already been collected. There will be opportunities to become involved in other projects, develop new analytic strategies, and develop mentored fellowship and grant applications (e.g. F32/K).  

We are particularly excited about candidates with excellent writing, organizational, and statistical skills, and a strong background in functional neuroimaging and affective/clinical neuroscience. Expertise in HLM/MLM and related analytic techniques (e.g. SEM) or machine learning is desirable but not necessary. We want someone who is comfortable teaching themselves new techniques and who can jump right into doing science, so decent-or-better technical skills are mandatory. Applicants should have a Ph.D. in a relevant field and excellent organizational, interpersonal, and writing skills. This is a 1-year position that is potentially renewable, contingent on performance and funding.

Applicants should send a cover letter or portfolio describing relevant skills, experience, and interests—please provide concrete details about your technical contributions to past projects. Please include a current CV and contact information for 2-3 references to Dr. Shackman (shackman@umd.edu); the Director of Laboratory Operations, Kathryn DeYoung (deyoung.k@gmail.com); and the Laboratory Manager, Jazmine Wedlock (jwedlock@umd.edu). Applicants will be considered until the position is filled. The University of Maryland is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative-Action Employer. Read more about the NIMH R01 project here and here. Read more about the NIDA R21 project here and here.

This is a fantastic opportunity to live in and explore DC, MD, and Northern VA!

• • Learn more about the revitalization of College Park at the Greater College Park website, in the Fall 2018 issue of Terp Magazine (flip to page 38) and in a special section of the Washington Business Journal

• • College Park recently made Washingtonian magazine’s annual Best of the DMV list

• • College Park and neighboring Hyattsville were highlighted again in the Washingtonian and the Washington Post
  • Hyattsville deemed a ‘hot’ neighborhood by the Washingtonian

The University of Maryland is an equal opportunity affirmative action employer with a commitment to racial, cultural, and gender diversity.  We do not discriminate in hiring on the basis of sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religious creed, national origin, physical or mental disability, protected Veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law. 

A hearty congrats to Gloria Kim, who successfully proposed her NACS First Year Project!

Gloria’s NIDA-sponsored project is focused on understanding the contributions of the extended amygdala to heightened negative emotion and amplified stress reactivity in tobacco smokers experiencing acute nicotine withdrawal during a period of voluntary abstinence.

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.

Dr. Shackman was selected as a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the leading international organization dedicated to advancing basic and applied scientific psychology.

Paranoid ideation—the mistaken belief that intentional harm is likely to occur—spans a continuum, from mild suspicion to persecutory delusions. Among patients with schizophrenia and other psychosis disorders, elevated levels of paranoia are common, debilitating, and challenging to treat.

The cues (public environments, strangers) and processes (anxiety) that promote paranoia have grown increasingly clear, but the brain bases of these pathways are unknown, thwarting the development of mechanistic models and, ultimately, the development of more effective or tolerable biological interventions.

This multi-disciplinary project will use a combination of tools to clarify the factors governing paranoia. We will enroll the full spectrum of paranoia without gaps or discontinuities—including psychosis patients with frank persecutory delusions and matched community controls. These data will allow us to rigorously examine the hypothesized contribution of brain circuits responsible for triggering anxiety and evaluating the threat potential of everyday social cues. Integrating neuroimaging measures with smartphone experience-sampling data will enable us to extend these insights to the real world for the first time. It has become increasingly clear that traditional psychiatric diagnoses, like Schizophrenia, present significant barriers to understanding etiology. Our focus on dimensional measures of paranoia overcomes many of these barriers and dovetails with the HiTOP framework.

This project is led by Drs. Jack Blanchard, Jason Smith, and Alex Shackman at Maryland, and encompasses a collaboration with Dr. Alan Anticevic‘s group at Yale. The award is sponsored by the National Institute of Mental Health.

Shannon Grogans’ revised application was selected for an honorable mention (top 25%) by the National Science Foundation. This is an extremely competitive national award, with more than 12,000 applications submitted every year. Congratulations, Shannon!!!

Gloria Kim, a first-year graduate student in the lab, was awarded a
Computation and Mathematics for Biological Networks (COMBINE) fellowship. COMBINE is the University of Maryland’s National Science Foundation-funded Research Traineeship (NRT) program in Network Biology. COMBINE immerses doctoral students in interdisciplinary research and training that integrates quantitative modeling methods from physics and mathematics with data processing, analysis, and visualization tools from computer science to gain deeper insights into the structural and dynamical principles governing living systems. Participants learn to utilize a network-based, data-driven approach, focusing on how interaction patterns can give insights into complex biological phenomena. COMBINE prepares students to become experts in the process of transforming raw biological data into useful information from which new biological insights can be inferred, positioning them to pursue a range of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) careers at the nexus of the computer, physical, and life sciences. Fellows receive training in 4 areas of network analysis: (a) quantitative metrics for biological networks, (b) mechanistic models of biological networks, (c) network statistics and machine learning for biological applications, and (d) and visualization techniques for large, complex biological data sets. Dr. Rasmus Birn (Departments of Psychiatry & Medical Physics, University of Wisconsin, Madison) will serve as the out-of-field mentor for Gloria’s fellowship. Learn more about COMBINE.

Richard, a longtime research assistant in the lab, successfully defended his senior thesis, “Dispositional negativity and the central extended amygdala.” Dr. Shackman chaired the thesis committee, which included Drs. Jens Herberholz and Quentin Gaudry. The thesis was accepted without revision and received the honors designation to boot. Congrats, Richard! We’re proud of you!

The University of Maryland has awarded Rachael Tillman a prestigious Wylie Dissertation Fellowship for the 2019-2020 academic year. Congrats, Rachael!

Dr. Manuel Kuhn will be joining our team in July 2019! Welcome aboard, Manuel!

This is a fantastic opportunity to live in and explore DC, MD, and Northern VA!

• • Learn more about the lab
  • Learn more about the revitalization of College Park at the Greater College Park website, in the Fall 2018 issue of Terp Magazine (flip to page 38), and in a special section of the Washington Business Journal

• • College Park recently made Washingtonian magazine’s annual Best of the DMV list

• • College Park and neighboring Hyattsville were highlighted again in the Washingtonian and the Washington Post
  • Hyattsville deemed a ‘hot’ neighborhood by the Washingtonian

Emotions are central to who we are. They influence our worldviews, decisions, and memories and play a key role in determining which of the myriad events bombarding our senses we see, hear, and feel. Emotions arise in direct proportion to personal meaning—how relevant a stimulus or situation is to our well-being. They are thought to be hallmarks of integrative brain processes that bind together perceptions of the world, interoception of our bodily states, conceptions of meaning, and prospections about the future. Their integrative nature also makes them complex, and for decades the brain processes that underlie emotions have remained part of a dark unknown space in our understanding of the mind. However, recent years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in the organization of emotional brain systems. Numerous papers, reviews, and books—academic and popular-press—deconstruct the ‘emotional brain’ and its implications for health, disease, and other kinds of practically important outcomes. Our Special Issue of Neuroscience Letters, Functional Neuroimaging of the Emotional Brain (Guest Edited by Tor Wager & Alex Shackman), surveys recent advances in this burgeoning area of research, with leading investigators from across North America and Europe contributing 10 original theoretical reviews. This exciting body of work encompasses a broad spectrum of populations—from rodents and monkeys, to children and psychiatric patients—and showcases a wide variety of paradigms, measures, analytic strategies, and conceptual approaches.

Postdoctoral fellow, Juyoen Hur, was accepted into the 2019 ADAA Career Development Leadership Program. Congrats, Juyoen!

What have researchers learned about the roots of human emotion? That’s the focus of the recently published “The Nature of Emotion”. Co-editor Alex Shackman shares the latest research on the mind and our understanding of our emotions in this interview. 

A new paper from the lab was selected for special promotion by the Journal of Neuroscience and has since been picked up by a number of local and national media outlets, including the University of Maryland, ScienceNews, Newsweek, and The Diamondback. 

If you’re planning to attend the upcoming SRP meeting in Indianapolis, please consider extending your visit to the heartland by 36 hours and participating in the HiTOP 2018 satellite meeting on Sunday and Monday.

The satellite meeting will be on September 23rd-24th, 2018. On Sunday the 23rd we will meet in the afternoon and on Monday the meeting will be a full day of programming and work group activities.

To learn more about HiTOP and the urgent need for next-gen nosology, check out these new papers:

Krueger, R. F., Kotov, R., Watson, D., Forbes, M. K., Eaton, N. R., Ruggero, C. J., Simms, L. J., Widiger, T. A., Achenbach, T. M., Bach, B., Bagby, R. M., Bornovalova, M. A., Carpenter, W. T., Chmielewski, M., Cicero, D., Clark, L. A., Conway, C., DeClercq, B., DeYoung, C. G., Docherty, A. R., Drislane, L. E., First, M. B., Forbush, K. T., Hallquist, M., Haltigan, J. D., Hopwood, C. J., Ivanova, M. Y., Jonas, K. G., Latzman, R. D., Markon, K. E., Miller, J. D., Morey, L. C., Mullins-Sweatt, S. N., Ormel, J., Patalay, P., Patrick, C. J., Pincus, A. L., Regier, D. A., Reininghaus, U., Rescorla, L. A., Samuel, D. B., Sellbom, M., Shackman, A. J., Skodol, A., Slade, T., South, S. C., Sunderland, M., Tackett, J. L., Venables, N. C., Waldman, I. D., Waszczuk, M. A., Waugh, M. H., Wright, A. G. C., Zald, D. H. & Zimmerman, J. (2018). Progress in achieving empirical classification of psychopathology. World Psychiatry, 17, 282-293. PDF ** Focus of nine accompanying commentaries PDF

Conway, C. C., Forbes, M. K., Forbush, K. T., Fried, E. I., Hallquist, M. N., Kotov, R., Mullins-Sweatt, S. N., Shackman, A. J., Skodol, A. E., South, S. C., Sunderland, M., Waszczuk, M. A., Zald, D. H., Afzali, M. H., Bornovalova, M. A., Carragher, N., Docherty, A. R., Jonas, K. G., Krueger, R. F., Patalay, P., Pincus, A. L., Tackett, J. L., Reininghaus, U., Waldman, I. D., Wright, A. G. C., Zimmerman, J., Bach, B., Bagby, R. M., Chmielewski, M., Cicero, D. C., Clark, L. A., Dalgleish, T., DeYoung, C. G., Hopwood, C. J., Ivanova, M. Y., Latzman, R. D., Patrick, C. J., Ruggero, C. J., Samuel, D. B., Watson, D. & Eaton, N. R. (revision under review). A Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology can reform mental health research. Preprint available at psyarxiv.com PDF

Ruggero, C. J., Kotov, R., Hopwood, C., First, M., Clark, L. A., Skodol, A., Mullins-Sweatt, S. N., Patrick, C. J., Bach, B., Cicero, D., Docherty, A., Simms, L. J., Bagby, M., Krueger, R. F., Callahan, J., Chmielewski, M., Conway, C., DeClercq, B. J., Dornbach-Bender, A., Eaton, N., Forbes, M., Forbush, K., Haltigan, J. D., Miller, J. D., Morey, L. C., Patalay, P., Regier, D., Reninghaus, U., Shackman, A. J., Shteynberg, Y., Waszczuk, M. A., Watson, D., Wright, A. G. C., Zimmerman, J. (under review). Integrating the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology into clinical practice. Preprint available at psyarxiv.com PDF

Waszczuk, M. A., Eaton, N. R., Krueger, R. F., Shackman, A. J., Waldman, I. D., Zald, D. H., Lahey, B. B., Patrick, C. J., Conway, C. C., Ormel, J., Hyman, S. F., Robinson, E. B., Fried, E. I., Forbes, M. K., Althoff, R. R., Bach, B., Chmielewski, M., DeYoung, C. G., Docherty, A., Forbush, K. T., Hallquist, M., Hopwood, C. J., Ivanova, M., Jonas, K. G., Latzman, R. D., Markon, K. E., Mullins-Sweatt, S. N., Pincus, A. L., Reininghaus, U., South, S. C., Tackett, J. L., Watson, D. (under review). Redefining phenotypes to advance psychiatric genetics: Implications from the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology. Preprint available at psyarxiv.com PDF

Planning to attend the upcoming SRP meeting in Indy? Lease consider booking a flight that enables you to attend what promises to be a very interesting roundtable discussion on Sunday morning (10:30am – 12:00pm): Training the Next Generation of Clinical Scientists: Challenges and Opportunities, featuring Dylan Gee (Yale), Alex Shackman (Maryland), Bob Levenson (Cal/PCSAS), Deanna Barch (Wash U), Michelle Craske (UCLA), Erika Forbes (Pitt), Bob Krueger (Minnesota), & Timothy Strauman (Duke).

Dr. Shackman was asked to serve on the Society of Biological Psychiatry‘s Education Committee (2018-2021). The committee develops and implements programs to promote the professional development of early career investigators. SoBP is the leading society for researchers focused on understanding the biology of mental illness.

Rachael successfully defended her dissertation proposal, “Neural correlates of social threat anticipation and presentation in adolescents with social anxiety disorder.” You can learn more about the study here. Congrats, Rachael!

Allegra will be working under Dr. Bruce Compas in the Stress and Coping Research Lab at Vanderbilt. There, she will be working on an NIH-funded study examining a Family Depression Prevention program for youth and their parents with depressive disorders. Additionally, she will be assisting with another NIH-funded study examining psychological and biological responses to stress in adolescents who have experienced early trauma. Congratulations, Allegra!

The Nature of Emotion, 2nd Edition. Forthcoming from Oxford University Press, Summer 2018.

Building on the legacy of the groundbreaking first edition, the Editors of this unique volume have selected more than 100 leading emotion researchers from around the world and asked them to address 14 fundamental questions about the nature and origins of emotion.

For example: What is an emotion? How are they organized in the brain? How are they embodied in the social world? How and why are emotions communicated? How are emotions embodied in the body? How do they influence cognition and decision making? What develops in emotional development?

Each chapter addresses one of these questions, with often divergent answers from the experts represented here: Adam Anderson, Lauren Atlas, Yair Bar-Haim, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Kent Berridge, Jennifer Urbano Blackford, Caroline Blanchard, Margaret Bradley, Ralph Adolphs, Joshua Carlson, Laura Carstensen, Luke Chang, Joan Chiao, Gerald Clore, Roshan Cools, Eveline Crone, Antonio Damasio, Hanna Damasio, Richard Davidson, Mauricio Delgado, Nazanin Derakshan, Nancy Eisenberg, Naomi Eisenberger, Paul Ekman, Phoebe Ellsworth, Andrew Fox, Nathan Fox, Barbara Fredrickson, Jonathan Freeman, Karl Friston, Matthias Gamer, Beatrice de Gelder, Paul Glimcher, Hill Goldsmith, Todd Hare, Lasana Harris, Catherine Hartley, Aaron Heller, Ursula Hess, Quentin Huys, Tom Johnstone, Jerome Kagan, Dacher Keltner, Brian Knutson, Peter Lang, Regina Lapate, Edward Lemay, Robert Levenson, Wen Li, Matthew Lieberman, Bruce McEwen, Katie McLaughlin, Andrew Meltzoff, Mohammed Milad, Elisabeth Murray, Kristin Naragon-Gainey, Charles Nelson, Paula Niedenthal, Hadas Okon-Singer, Jaak Panksepp, Carolyn Parkinson, Luiz Pessoa, Rosalind Picard, Carien van Reekum, Edmund Rolls, Melissa Rosenkranz, Carol Ryff, Tim Salomons, Anil Seth, Alexander Shackman, Rebecca Shiner, Tania Singer, Peter Sokol-Hessner, Leah Somerville, Daniel Tranel, Kay Tye, Tor Wager, Leanne Williams, Rachel Yehuda, and David Zald.

At the end of each chapter, the Editors—Andrew Fox, Regina Lapate, Alexander Shackman, and Richard Davidson—highlight key areas of agreement and disagreement.

In the final chapter—The nature of emotion: A research agenda for the 21st century —the Editors outline their own perspective on the most important challenges facing the field today and the most fruitful avenues for future research.

Not a textbook offering a single viewpoint, The Nature of Emotion reveals the central issues in emotion research and theory in the words of many of the leading scientists working in the field today, from senior researchers to rising stars, providing a unique and highly accessible guide for students, instructors, researchers, and clinicians.

Now available for pre-order at Amazon ($65 paperback). Due to be released August 1, 2018. Please contact Dr. Shackman or OUP if you are interested in potentially adopting the book for a course–we’re happy to facilitate in any way that we can.  

Take a look at the Table of Contents.

We’re all very proud of Melissa Stockbridge, who successfully defended her dissertation, “The role of personality on cognitive-linguistic deficits in teens and adults with mild TBI.” Dispositional negativity — here indexed using BFI-2-N — strongly predicts patient reports of symptoms in the months following a concussion. In fact, Melissa showed that this is true even if you censor overlapping content. In contrast, patient disposition was unrelated to computerized measures of cognitive function. Collectively, these results suggest that everyday clinical decision-making (e.g. return to play) can be biased by patient personality, and underscore the promise of developing clinic-friendly e-cog technology for objective testing. A key challenge for the future will be to prospectively assess these personality-symptom relations in high-risk individuals (e.g. student-athletes, combat personnel). Congratulations, Dr. Stockbridge!

Melissa Stockbridge will be defending her dissertation. Her presentation is open to all.

The role of personality on cognitive-linguistic deficits in teens and adults with mild TBI

Thursday, May 17, 2018 – 2:00pm to 4:00pm
Language Science Center; room 2124 HJ Patterson Hall

Even the mildest form of traumatic brain injury, concussion, can result in adverse physical, cognitive, behavioral, and social consequences. Concussion injuries frequently result in patients who describe deficits in daily communication and overall “fogginess,” but whose deficits are not consistently captured on traditional assessments of language. The purpose of this research was two-fold: first, to examine typed written communication in order to better understand the kinds of cognitive and language deficits that adolescents and adults experience immediately and chronically following a concussion; and second, to examine the influence of a particular trait-like dimension of personality and temperament, the propensity toward more frequent, intense, and enduring negative affect (called dispositional negativity), on exacerbation of these deficits. Using a survey conducted entirely online, 92 participants aged 12-40 years old who had a recent concussion, a history of concussion, or no history of brain injury wrote two narrative samples and an expository sample, completed multiple tasks targeting word-level and domain general cognitive skills, and provided rich self-report information important to better understanding their personality, temperament, and mental health. Performance by recently injured participants suggested that deficits in narrative language, though likely influenced by problems in word-finding, memory, and attention, also existed beyond what could be explained by those deficits alone. Narrative-specific deficits were observed in written content, organization, and cohesiveness. Moreover, including dispositional negativity in models of concussion history (group) and self-reported somatic symptomology improved the sensitivity and specificity of these models, which supports the value of considering individual differences in personality when engaged in concussion management.

Gloria Kim has been selected for a Maryland Summer Scholars Award from the Maryland Center for Undergraduate Research. Congratulations! Her project, which is mentored by Juyoen Hur, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab,  builds on our on-going NIMH sponsored study focused on understanding the brain systems that confer risk for developing mood and anxiety disorders in university students.

Acute alcohol administration dampens threat-related activation in the central extended amygdala

Continue reading New preprint available on bioRxiv: Hur et al. Acute alcohol administration dampens threat-related activation in the central extended amygdala →

Dr. Shackman has joined the Editorial Board of Neuropsychologia as Emotion and Social Neuroscience Section (Handling) Editor.

As part of our lab’s on-going commitment to promoting reproducible science, accelerating the pace of scientific discovery, and maximizing the impact of public support for biomedical research, we are sharing data from several recent imaging studies via NeuroVault.org. Links to the relevant data collections can be found in the Publications section of our website.

Please join us for student presentations at SFN/DC and ABCT/San Diego!

SFN

Melissa Stockbridge (UMD/Newman Lab) will be presenting recent work using a combination of brain imaging techniques—including high-precision single-subject analyses and machine learning-based brain signatures—to demonstrate that anxiety, pain, and cognitive control are functionally integrated in the mid-cingulate cortex (MCC) at SFN on Wednesday November 15, 2017, 8:00 – 12:00 PM Halls A-C as part of Session 700 – Emotional States: Empathy. 700.09 / PP28. This work is part of a collaboration with Luiz Pessoa, Dave Seminowicz, Tor Wager, and Wani Woo.

ABCT

Allegra Anderson and Katie DeYoung will be presenting new experience-sampling (EMA) work demonstrating that individuals who, by virtue of their more negative/neurotic disposition, are at risk for developing anxiety disorders and depression are actually more responsive to the ‘mood brightening’ impact of positive daily events. Matt Barstead (UMD/Rubin Lab) was also involved in the project. Allegra will be presenting the poster at ABCT on (PS11- #A31) on Saturday, November 18 12:15 PM – 1:15 PM Location: Indigo Ballroom CDGH, Level 2, Indigo Level.

Jim Doorley (GMU/Kashdan Lab) will be describing work aimed at better understanding the momentary experience of social anxiety disorder at ABCT on Saturday, November 18 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM Location: Aqua Salon A & B, Level 3, Aqua Level.

If you’re interested in learning more about our work, please join us for upcoming presentations–

Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Iowa: October 27, 2017

S4SN Meeting, DC: November 10, 2017. Join us for a wonderful symposium organized by Kalina Michalska!

SFN Meeting, DC: November 15, 2017. Melissa Stockbridge will be presenting some exciting new collaborative work focused on the integration of anxiety, pain, and cognitive control in the cingulate!

Department of Psychology Neuroscience Seminar Series, Yale University: November 17, 2017

Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University: March 29, 2018

ADAA Meeting, DC: April 6-7, 2017. Join us for a symposium on recent advances in our understanding of extreme early-life anxiety, featuring Jenni Blackford (Vanderbilt), Dylan Gee (Yale), and Lisa Williams (Wisconsin)!

“Neural circuitry governing anxious individuals’ mis-allocation of working memory to threat,” an article co-authored by Dr. Alex Shackman, was featured on Psychpost!

The article details how threatening information invades the working memory of anxious individuals. Check out the story here!

Allegra has been chosen to attend the University of Minnesota’s Diversity in Psychology Program! This is a competitive award granted to historically underrepresented individuals in psychology graduate programs who are interested in learning doctoral training at UMN.

The program involves meetings with program faculty members and graduate students to discuss students’ research interests and presentations designed to familiarize participants with strategies for constructing successful graduate school applications. Travel, lodging, and meals are provided for all attendees.

Congrats, Allegra!

The Shackman lab is thrilled to have joined the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP) Consortium, an international workgroup of clinical and personality psychologists, psychiatrists, statisticians, and neurobiologists focused on understanding the nature of mental illness and using data-driven approaches to develop better and more useful tools for diagnosing and measuring psychiatic disorders and symptoms.

You can learn more about HiTOP here.

Samiha recently presented her undergraduate honors thesis project in a poster session at the 125^th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association (APA) in Washington, D.C. Her thesis explored risk factors for psychological well-being and distress among South Asian American young adults.

APA is the largest annual gathering of psychologists from across the world, featuring individuals from a variety of professional settings presenting on topics from all sub-fields in psychology. This organization’s main purpose is to communicate methods of improving health and wellness through the practice of psychology.

Congrats, Samiha!

Allegra has been invited to the University of Delaware’s Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program Visit Day! This is a competitive award granted to research-oriented students and recent graduates from underrepresented groups who want to learn more about doctoral training in clinical science.

The program involves informative presentations on applying to graduate school, individual and small group meetings with program faculty members and graduate students to discuss students’ research interests, and social events & networking with current graduate students and faculty members. Travel, lodging, and meals are provided for all attendees.

Congratulations, Allegra!

A very warm welcome to our new post-doctoral fellow, Juyoen Hur!

Juyoen is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2017 and completed her clinical internship at the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health. Her program of research examines the attentional and affective mechanisms of anxiety disorders and depression, particularly focusing on the interactive influences of emotion and attention. Her interest in studying the interplay of cognitive and emotional risk factors for anxiety and depression stems from its potential to identify novel treatment targets and thus improve prevention and intervention efforts.

Claire is currently completing a clinical externship with the Health Psychology and Neurobehavioral Research Group at the National Cancer Institute within NIH. Her training focuses on neuropsychological assessment and treatment of the cognitive, behavioral, and psychological problems of adolescents and adults with chronic medical conditions, especially those with neurobehavioral effects (e.g., brain tumors, leukemia, sickle cell anemia, neurofibromatosis type 1), enrolled on treatment protocols at the NCI and other NIH institutes.

Rachael’s current clinical externship placement is at the Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders at Children’s National Hospital. Her training focuses on neuropsychological and diagnostic evaluations for children, adolescents, and young adults on the autism spectrum, or suspected of having an autism spectrum disorder. Go, Rachael!

Claire successfully defended her master’s project.

This functional MRI project is focused on understanding the anxiety-reducing effects of alcohol on the neural systems underlying fear and anxiety in a community sample of healthy adults (21-35 years). For this project, we developed and employed a novel fMRI task paradigm which selectively manipulates temporal certainty during threat-of-shock. 

In particular, Claire’s masters focused on the dose-dependent consequences of acute alcohol intoxication on the two major divisions of the central extended amygdala–the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis and the central nucleus of the amygdala. 

This work builds on prior mechanistic studies in rodents and psychophysiological findings in humans, and helps set the stage for more integrative and bidirectional translational models to elucidate mechanisms underlying anxiety and substance abuse.

The supervising committee consisted of Drs. Alex Shackman, Luiz Pessoa, Ed Bernat, and Matthew Roesch.

Congrats, Claire!

The Shackman lab is out and about! Please join us for what promises to be a fun and interesting series of talks and symposia!

1. SOBP in San Diego. Darn, too late!
2. APS meeting in Boston: May 26, 2017, 2:30-3:50 PM, Constitution B: New directions on the affective consequences of interpersonal relationships: Mechanisms, individual differences, and relationship characteristics (Venaglia, Lemay, Shackman, Cheung, & Clark)
3. ARP meeting in Sacramento: June 9, 2017, 9:00-10:15 AM: Personality among the primates: A phylogenetic and neurobiological excursion (DeYoung, Shackman, Fox, Latzman & Grazioplen)
4. University of Iowa, Department of Psychology: October 27, 2017.
5. Yale, Department of Psychology, Neuroscience series: November 17th, 2017.

The 2016-17 UMD combined colloquia series has been amazing, providing members of the lab with a number of outstanding opportunities for discussing our work with outside experts, including Jonathan Fadok, Katia Harle, Sabine Kastner, Hedy Kober, Liz Phelps, Russ Poldrack, Kerry Ressler, and Lucina Uddin. Still to come, presentations from Todd Braver and Michael Platt.

In addition, a number of outstanding scientists will be descending on Baltimore next week for the annual Maryland Neuroimaging Retreat, including Lauren Atlas, Catherine Bushnell, Cam Craddock, Martin Lindquist, Ben Seymour,  Tor Wager and our very own, Alex Shackman.  Please consider joining us for what promises to be an exciting series of talks and panel discussions.

And next year: Kay Tye!

Study Coordinator

Post-baccalaureate Position in Affective and Clinical/Translational Neuroscience

University of Maryland, College Park, MD

Candidates are being considered for a NIH-funded post-baccalaureate (study coordinator) position in the laboratory of Dr. Alex Shackman in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland at College Park (http://shackmanlab.org/). The overarching mission of the lab is to have a deep impact on the fields of affective and clinical/translational neuroscience. To that end, we do our best 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. As part of several recent NIH awards, the focus of this position will be to support on-going projects aimed at understanding the neurobiology of fear and anxiety and its role in the development and maintenance of adult anxiety disorders, depression, and substance abuse. This position will provide opportunities to gain experience with neuroimaging (fMRI), ecological momentary assessment (EMA), eye-tracking, psychophysiological, and clinical interviewing techniques. This is an exciting opportunity for receiving top-notch mentorship and establishing a competitive research record in preparation for graduate school. This is a 1 year position that is renewable for a total of 2 years, contingent on performance and funding. Duties may include, but are not limited to, subject recruitment, data acquisition using behavioral and neuroimaging techniques, study management, database management, data processing/analysis, and lab management. We are particularly excited about candidates with a background in imaging methods, programming, digital signal processing, quantitative methods, statistics, or related areas. Applicants should send a cover letter describing relevant experience and interests, CV/resume, and 2-3 letters of reference to Dr. Shackman (shackman@umd.edu). Applicants will be considered until the position is filled. The University of Maryland is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative-Action Employer.

Read more about the NIMH R01 project here and here. Read more about the NIDA R21 project here and here.

Congratulations to Rachael Tillman, who passed her qualifying exams to become an official doctoral candidate in clinical psychology!

Richard Hum, an RA in the lab, was recently accepted into the Biology Honors Program, joining a long list of lab RA’s who have participated in similar campus programs, including the Biological Sciences Honors Internship Program, Integrated Life Sciences (ILS) Honors Program, Research Internship in Science and Engineering (RISE) Scholarship Program, and Summer Research Initiative (SRI) Fellowship Program. Congrats, Richard!

A very warm welcome to our newest post-baccalaureate staff person, Allegra Anderson! Allegra will be providing administrative support and supporting data collection for our NIH funded R01 and R21 projects.

Congratulations to graduate student Rachael Tillman, who received a fellowship that will enable her to attend the upcoming Tools of the Trade Workshop at UCLA. The workshop is jointly sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and Stanford Center for Reproducible Neuroscience. Read more about the imaging workshop here.

Rachael successfully defended her master’s project.

This functional MRI project is focused on clarifying the architecture of functional architecture of circuits centered on the two major divisions of the central extended amygdala–the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis and the central nucleus of the amygdala–in a large sample of healthy, community dwelling adults. This work lays a basic neuroscience foundation for understanding alterations of these circuits in psychiatric populations.

The supervising committee consisted of Drs. Alex Shackman, Elizabeth Redcay, Luiz Pessoa, and Nathan Fox.

Congrats, Rachael!

Slides and syllabi are now available for:

Psychology 435: Advanced undergraduate course in Temperament & Personality–Developmental origins, biological bases, and implications for psychopathology

Psychology 612: Graduate seminar in Temperament & Personality–Developmental origins, biological bases, and implications for psychopathology

Updated for Fall 2016.

We are now accepting applications for the 2017 in-coming class. You are welcome to apply via the Clinical area group in the Department of Psychology or via the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) training program. Learn more here: http://shackmanlab.org/positions/graduate-students/

Please note that the major focus of this position will be on neural circuitry underlying fear and anxiety in young adults. A secondary focus will be on linking variation in the function of that circuitry to thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the real-world, indexed using ecological momentary assessment (EMA) techniques. Eye-tracking measures of attention and peripheral physiological measures of arousal will also be incorporated. We are particularly excited about candidates with a passion for fear/anxiety and a strong background in imaging, programming, digital signal processing, or related areas.

This research is funded by the University of Maryland and the National Institutes of Health.

Thanks to generous support from the National Institutes of Health, lab members now have access to a total of 4 servers (Badger, Ferret, Fisher, and Polecat), which will enable us to keep abreast with a growing flood of new imaging and peripheral physiological data.

If you’re curious, you can read more of the details here.

Congratulations to Claire Kaplan, who was honored with a travel award by the Society for Research in Psychopathology for her poster entitled ‘Understanding the neurobiology of fear and anxiety.’ This a huge honor only given to the top 5% of posters at the meeting. Claire’s project leverages a combination of multiband functional MRI and a novel MultiThreat Countdown task to characterize the neural systems engaged by certain and uncertain threat.

You can view the poster here and read some related papers here and here. The task was adapted from earlier fear-potentiated startle work by Hefner, Curtin and colleagues.

This work was supported by the University of Maryland, NSF, and NIH.

Dr. Shackman will be speaking at:

56th Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR): September 21-25 (Time/Room TBA), 2016, at the Marriott City Center Hotel, Minneapolis

UMD Counseling Center: November 30, 2016 at noon.

The lab provides an excellent opportunity to get hands-on experience with data collection. It’s a great way to prepare for successful careers in research (graduate school,  postbac fellowships at the NIH and Lieber Institute, NSF REU fellowships) or medicine (medical school)!

Learn more about the lab’s philosophy and mission here. Or, explore our website to find out more about the exciting kinds of research conducted by our team.

In order to apply, please download the application form. Email the completed application and an unofficial copy of your transcripts to Dr. Shackman (shackman@umd.edu).

Congrats to Claire!

Claire Kaplan’s poster focused on “Understanding the neurobiology of fear and anxiety” was selected as one of the preliminary finalists for the Smadar Levin Student Poster Award by the Society for Research in Psychopathology (SRP). Congratulations!

To learn more about SRP, please visit their website.

Shackman lab receives NIDA R21 award

The National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) has awarded a $418,000 grant to the University of Maryland to support research aimed at understanding the neurobiology of nicotine dependence.

Nearly 50 million Americans smoke tobacco and smoking is the leading cause of premature death and disability in the US. The grant will support a team of researchers, led by Professor Alex Shackman in the Department of Psychology at Maryland, who plan to use state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques and smart-phone technology to clarify, for the first time, the relevance of anxiety-related brain circuits to chronic tobacco use and acute nicotine withdrawal in humans—a critical step toward the development of new, brain-based cessation aids.

Dr. Shackman notes that, “while the transition from tobacco use to nicotine dependence is associated with long-lasting changes in multiple emotional and motivational mechanisms, most neurobiological research in humans has focused on reward-related systems. This is unfortunate because heightened anxiety is a hallmark of nicotine deprivation and there is compelling evidence that anxiety and negative affect powerfully motivate nicotine dependence and relapse.”

The investigators plan to use functional MRI (fMRI) to quantify anxiety-related brain function in abstinent and non-abstinent tobacco smokers. Mobile phone technology will be used to assess smoker’s daily perceptions of stress, anxiety, depression, and craving, as well as actual smoking behavior. According to Dr. Shackman, this project “will provide an important first opportunity to see whether models of addiction developed in rodents apply to humans and hopefully will inform the development of new treatments for tobacco addiction.”

Other members of the investigative team include Dr. Jason Smith in the Department of Psychology at Maryland; Dr. Luiz Pessoa, Director of the Maryland Neuroimaging Center; Dr. Megan Piper from the Center for Tobacco Research and Intervention at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Dr. John Curtin in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

7/11/2016 | College Park, MD USA

The National Science Foundation has awarded a prestigious Graduate Research Fellowship to Claire Kaplan, a second year graduate student in the laboratory. This will provide three years of support for her exciting program of neuropsychopharmacology research.

It’s common knowledge that a drink or two reduces anxiety. While the molecular underpinnings of this anti-anxiety effect is well established, remarkably little is known about the brain networks that mediate the anxiety-reducing effects of alcohol or other widely used anxiolytic medications. Claire’s work aims to address this fundamental question. Her on-going research is focused on establishing the influence of different doses of alcohol on the function of brain circuits implicated in fear and anxiety. Another project, still in design stages, will focus on the impact of the benzodiazepines, a drug commonly prescribed for patients suffering from extreme anxiety. This program of research promises important new insights into the mechanisms that support pathological anxiety and contribute to the development of addiction. Ultimately, it promises to inform the development of more precise treatments for a range of common, often debilitating mental illnesses.

Claire’s research builds on the strengths of an international team of scientific collaborators, including Dr. Jason Smith, in the Department of Psychology at Maryland; Dr. Luiz Pessoa, Director of the Maryland Neuroimaging Center; Dr. John Curtin, in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin; and Dr. Siri Leknes, Oslo University Hospital, Oslo, Norway.

3/30/2016 | College Park, MD USA

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has awarded a 3.4 million dollar grant to the University of Maryland to support research aimed at understanding the mechanism that that promote the development of pathological anxiety and depression.

A growing body of data shows that these disorders impose a staggering burden on public health and the global economy, making them a growing concern for clinicians, researchers, and public policy makers. The anxiety disorders are the most common family of mental illnesses in the US and Europe and often contribute to the development of depression and substance abuse. Existing treatments are inconsistently effective or associated with significant side effects.

The new grant will support an international team of researchers, led by Professor Alex Shackman in the Department of Psychology at Maryland, who plan to use state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques, clinical measures, and smart-phone technology to clarify the mechanisms that support to the development and recurrence of anxiety disorders and depression—a critical step toward the development of new, brain-based strategies for preventing or treating these illnesses.

“This is a really exciting project, notes Dr. Shackman, “These disorders contribute to the suffering and misery of millions of patients and their loved ones all over the world, including many students at Maryland and other universities. The pipeline for developing new drugs is stalled. It’s imperative that we identify the brain circuits that underlie extreme anxiety and get a better handle on their relevance to changes in mood and function in the real world, close to the kinds of end-points that patients, families, and clinicians care about.”

One of the goals of the project is to use smart-phone technology to sample feelings, behavior, stress, and social support in college freshmen. “This is really one of the most novel and exciting parts of the project,” says Dr. Shackman. “I think the research community has done a great job using brain imaging techniques in people and more mechanistic interventions in rodents and monkeys to identify candidate circuits, networks in the brain that control anxiety. But we know almost nothing about whether any of those circuits actually predict anxiety, depression, or stress-reactivity where it matters, out in the real world. Here, we plan to use the smart-phones to intensively sample our subjects’ daily experience repeatedly for 30 months, as they transition from freshman year, to sophomore year, to junior and even senior year of university. We can then link those measures of experience and behavior back to measures of brain function collected during their freshman year, which we hope will enable us to discover patterns of brain function that predict who gets sick, who gets depressed, who starts drinking by themselves to cope with their stress.”

These data may provide new targets for drug development and guide the development of improved animal models of mental illness. “And it’s not just drugs,” Shackman emphasized, “this might give us some really important new clues about ways to better identify high-risk individuals before they get sick, and guide them into prevention programs focused on developing more effective coping skills. And the smart phone data may help us to develop better mobile apps for treating or even preventing these disorders, before relationships are strained, before performance in school or the workplace really starts to suffer.”

Other members of the international investigative team include Dr. Jason Smith in the Department of Psychology at Maryland; Drs. Greg Hancock and Nathan Fox in the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at Maryland; Dr. Luiz Pessoa, Director of the Maryland Neuroimaging Center; Dr. Todd Kashdan in the Department of Psychology at George Mason University; and Dr. Matthias Gamer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Würzburg, Germany.

To learn more about anxiety disorders and depression, please visit the Anxiety and Depression Association of America website.

3/30/2016 | College Park, MD USA

Recent research from Dr. Shackman and colleagues at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds has been incorporated into the Spring 2016 ‘Fuel Happiness’ campaign organized by Lululemon, the international athletic apparel company.

In a project spearheaded by Dr. Helen Weng, we demonstrated that compassion training can increase prosocial behavior and is associated with changes in a complex network of brain regions involved in social cognition and emotion regulation. This work provides preliminary scientific evidence that compassion can be systematically trained and that increased altruism emerges from changes in the brain.

The Fuel Happiness campaign is designed to spread the news about recent meditation and mindfulness research and, in so doing, encourage all of us to to take a few moments to cultivate an increased sense of compassion for themselves and others.

Weng, H. Y., Fox, A. S., Shackman, A. J., Stodola, D. E., Caldwell, J. Z. K., Olson, M. C., Rogers, G. M. & Davidson, R. J. (2013). Compassion training alters altruism and the neural responses to suffering. Psychological Science, 24, 1171-80.

Learn more about the paper here.