Why do some of us experience anxiety? Why are there individual differences in the ways in which anxiety manifests? And how can we better understand the underlying mechanisms of anxiety so that we can develop better management skills? These have been my primary research questions. My past and current research involves probing these questions from different perspectives, with the use of behavioral, physiological, and neurocognitive assessments. After earning a B.A. in biology and an M.A. in psychology, I joined Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary’s lab to investigate the influence that learning explicit safety, which show potential clinical implications, has on anxiety-related overgeneralized fear.

Project

One cognitive mechanism of human anxiety is overgeneralized fear (OGF), or indiscriminate fear response to signals of threat and safety, which has been studied extensively through fear-learning paradigms as a disruption (e.g., exaggerated learning, delayed extinction) in the learning of cues indicating imminent danger. The role of safety learning in OGF, however, has not only received much less empirical attention but has also been fundamentally conceptualized as learning about the absence of threat rather than the presence of safety. In turn, the relative contributions of amplified learning of fear and impaired learning of safety to anxiety-related OGF remain poorly understood, as do the potentially unique biological and behavioral underpinnings of safety learning. The overall goal of the study is to investigate the effects of safety learning, compared to fear learning, on overgeneralized fear in anxious humans using a method based on a rodent parallel study, thus filling an important need for research that directly translates methodologies from animal to human models to allow for cross-species comparisons.

My dissertation project examines the role of explicit safety learning in OGF via behavioral, physiological, and neurocognitive assessment, thus providing converging evidence. The fellowship provided me an opportunity to pilot my project, and I was able to collect preliminary data with the current experimental design to verify feasibility of the study and make further modifications. The results can help to fill an important gap in research that directly translates animal models to human models and may have potential for the development of clinical interventions.