Anxiety Disorders

Anxiety and emotion in parent-child dyads: A multimodal study 2022 Award: $92,932 Anxiety is on the rise, is associated with altered emotional processing, and can emerge in preschool, a time when children rely on parents or caregivers to process emotional and handle worry. Developing successful treatments for childhood anxiety will depend on understanding the mechanisms that underlie it and parent-child dyads. This project is an important first step to better understand and treat anxiety disorders, by measuring brain and behavioral aspects of anxiety and emotion in both parents and children. Need/Problem: Anxiety disorders (AD) can emerge in early childhood and predict later symptoms and psychopathology. Emotional processing is an important core aspect of ADs – an underlying fear, worry, or distress. In preschool children, some worry is typical as they develop brain networks to process emotional information. This development [...]

A Web-based Intervention to Improve Mental Health Outcomes Among Newly Diagnosed Parents with Cancer 2020 Award: $39,997 Parental cancer threatens the mental health of the entire family. High-quality parental communication supports and facilitates psychological adjustment to illness for both parents and children, but many parents do not have timely access to these important mental health services. In this project we will develop and test a novel web-based psychosocial intervention designed to facilitate parental communication about cancer. If effective, this intervention could provide timely, cost-effective mental health support to address the communication concerns of distressed parents with cancer, thus improving mental health outcomes for their children as well. Need/Problem: Serious illness in a parent threatens the mental health of the entire family. The impact of parental cancer on the family can be reduced by facilitating parents’ communication about illness with [...]

A Translational Approach to Identify Biomarkers of COVID-19-related Social Stress in Healthcare Workers 2020 Award: $85,000 Psychosocial stress is ubiquitous in modern societies and - especially when excessive or persistent - can lead to several psychiatric disorders, including major depressive, post-traumatic stress, and anxiety disorders. As we have all observed in the news recently, one of the most vulnerable populations in the COVID-19 pandemic is our healthcare providers. Our research will integrate human studies and preclinical mouse models of social stress to understand how persistent social stress affects this population. Need/Problem: Stress-related psychiatric disorders, including major depressive, post-traumatic stress, and anxiety disorders, are the most common mental illnesses in the United States. With the recent COVID-19 pandemic, both the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the National Institute of Health (NIH) predict that the number of people suffering from [...]