Research Projects

The BRAIN Group at the University of Miami seeks to understand how behavior and brain function are different in adults and children with and without anxiety disorders.  Our research studies involve a variety of different methodologies, including brain imaging, computer tasks, interviews, and psychophysiology measures.  We hope that our research will help create better treatments for people with anxiety disorders.

Children and adolescents must utilize flexible thoughts, emotions and behaviors to adapt to drastic changes in their mental, physical, emotional and social environments throughout development. To date, most studies examine cognitive flexibility by measuring task-switching and set-shifting abilities. Cognitive inflexibility, detected as increased switch costs and/or neural perturbations during these tasks, has been linked to various mental health disorders in adults (e.g., Remijnse et al., 2013) and children (e.g., Britton et al., 2010). However, affective flexibility, the ability to switch between emotional and non-emotional content (e.g., Malooly et al., 2013), and valence flexibility, i.e., flexibility to switch between emotions, is understudied. Additionally, flexibility is required in everyday life without instruction to initiate changes and generate alternatives. 

Several projects aim to understand the behavioral and neural correlates of emotional flexibility across development. Additionally, we aim to understand the relationship between emotional flexibility and internalizing symptoms (e.g., anxiety, depressed mood).

Individuals with anxiety often report being afraid and avoid situations where they anticipate being afraid. One goal of exposure therapy is to reduce the anxiety and avoidance of objects and situations that evoke these inappropriate fear responses. Using extinction-related principles, individuals with anxiety learn over time that the object or situation is safe rather than threatening. In addition, individuals must recall this safety association outside of the clinic to overcome their anxiety when encountering their fears in the real-world.

Several projects aim to understand how individuals learn or classify an object or situation as safe or threatening, explore mechanisms underlying avoidance behavior, and investigate how threat influences perception, cognition, and behaviors.

Attention biases towards threat have been reported in both pediatric and adult anxiety (Bar-Haim et al., 2007). Threat biases may arise through perturbations in amygdala-prefrontal circuitry (Monk et al., 2006; Monk et al., 2008; Britton et al., 2012). In addition, Attention Bias Modification Training (ABMT) may reduce anxiety symptoms.