Research
Research in the lab adopts an interdisciplinary approach, integrating clinical, developmental, and translational/evolutionary perspectives with different tools from cognitive neuroscience to better understand emotion-cognition-behavior mechanisms underlying psychopathology and inform treatment.
To this end, we leverage advanced methods for capturing behavior, psychophysiology, functional and structural neuroimaging data, and more, in lab and virtual reality settings.
Some of our current and future research directions include quantifying abnormal motivated behavior, mapping the dynamics of fear, and developing methods to predict risk for anxiety and PTSD.
Our research is supported by the Israel Science Foundation, the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation, and many international and national collaborations.
Some examples of research outputs are detailed below.
Theory: from defensive responses to anxiety symptoms
A novel conceptualization of pathological anxiety and related symptoms that draws from evolutionary, clinical, and neuroscience perspectives.
Uncovering the neural circuitry of fear
Linking psychophysiology and neuroimaging to identify a neural circuit whose function relates to abnormal fear responses in anxiety.
Linking avoidance behavior and attention
Cross-modality integration of eye tracking and motion tracking data reveals threat-related biases in youth with anxiety.
Transdiagnostic brain-symptoms latent variables
Identifying patterns of brain connectivity and symptom associations that are shared across different diagnoses.
Identifying central symptoms in pediatric anxiety
Using network analyses of symptom data from a multi-site collaboration shows which symptoms may be more important than others in understanding anxiety.