Childhood Maltreatment & Characteristics of Depression
Childhood maltreatment is widely implicated as the strongest developmental risk factor for depression onset. The current research is novel in examining the fine-grained associations of childhood emotional versus physical versus sexual maltreatment to indices of the severity, course, and presence of anxiety and trauma-related psychopathology in depression.
Cortisol Reactivity to Stress Predicts Behavioral Responsivity to Reward
Depression is associated with blunted reactivity to acute stress, as well as blunted responsivity to rewards. However, the extent to which responses to stress are associated with responses to reward in individuals meeting criteria for a depressive disorder is unknown. The goal of this study was to examine the relation of responses to stress and reward, and to determine if this relation is moderated by depression diagnosis, anhedonia, and sex.
Theory of Mind in Dysphoric and Non-Dysphoric Adults
There is increasing behavioral evidence that Theory of Mind reasoning can be affected by mood. To gain insight into the ways sad mood may affect the underlying mechanisms of Theory of Mind reasoning, we recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs) as dysphoric and non-dysphoric participants reasoned about a protagonist’s true or false beliefs about an object’s location.