Faculty Research Interests

2007-2008

EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOPATHOLOGY AND CLINICAL

 
Hooker, Christine (joining the Harvard faculty in September 2007) — Christine Hooker received her PhD from Northwestern University in 2002. She completed her clinical training at the VA Northern California Health Care System and then worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow and later a Research Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. The goals of her research program are to investigate the neural mechanisms that facilitate social functioning in healthy adults and to understand how problems in these neural mechanisms contribute to symptoms in schizophrenia and other clinical disorders. Past and current projects include investigations of facial affect, gaze perception, and theory of mind processing in schizophrenia. A related line of research investigates the behavioral and neural factors that influence the quality of social relationships in healthy adults and individuals with schizophrenia. These projects use fMRI and diary methods to investigate the different ways that attachment style, rejection sensitivity, and empathy effect social relationships. She is also developing and testing social and cognitive training programs for schizophrenic patients.

Hooley, Jill M. — Professor Hooley received her BSc in Psychology from the University of Liverpool. This was followed by research work at Cambridge University. She subsequently attended Magdalen College and received her D.Phil. from Oxford University in 1985. She joined the faculty at Harvard the same year.

A major focus of Professor Hooley’s research interests concern psychosocial (especially family) predictors of psychiatric relapse in patients with severe psychopathology such as schizophrenia, depression, and borderline personality disorder. She is also interested in self-harming behavior (cutting, burning) and pain. Currently, Professor Hooley is using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore (1) how healthy people and individuals who are vulnerable to depression process emotionally challenging verbal comments from family members; and (2) how patients with borderline personality disorder process a variety of affectively challenging auditory and visual stimuli.

Selected publications:

Butcher, J., Mineka, S., & Hooley, J. M. (2004). Abnormal Psychology (12th Edn.) Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Hooley, J. M. (in press). Do psychiatric patients do better clinically if they live with certain kinds of families? Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Hooley, J. M. & Chung, R. (2003). Pain insensitivity in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. In M. F. Lenzenweger and J. M. Hooley (Eds). Principles of experimental psychopathology. Washington, DC: American Psychological Press.

Hooley, J. M. & Campbell, C. (2002). Control and controllability: An examination of beliefs and behavior in high and low expressed emotion relatives. Psychological Medicine, 32, 1091-1099.

Hooley, J. M. & Delgado, M. L. (2001). Pain insensitivity in the relatives of schizophrenia patients. Schizophrenia Research, 47, 265-273.

Hooley. J. M., & Gotlib. I. H. (2000). A diathesis-stress conceptualization of expressed emotion and clinical outcome. Journal of Applied and Preventive Psychology, 9, 135-151.

Hooley, J. M., & Hoffman, P. D. (1999). Expressed emotion and clinical outcome in borderline personality disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry, 156, 1557-1562.

McNally, Richard J. — Professor McNally received his BS in psychology from Wayne State University in 1976 and his PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1982. He spent the next two years as a clinical psychology intern and postdoctoral fellow at the Behavior Therapy Unit in the Department of Psychiatry at Temple University Medical School before moving to the Chicago Medical School where he established a research and treatment clinic for anxiety disorders. He joined the Harvard faculty as Associate Professor in 1991, and was promoted to Professor in 1995. He served on the specific phobia and posttraumatic stress disorder committees of the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-IV Task Force and on the National Institute of Mental Health’s consensus panels for the assessment of panic disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder. His research interests include the application of cognitive psychology methods to elucidate information-processing abnormalities in anxiety disorders, especially panic disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. An additional interest concerns the study of memory in people reporting histories of childhood sexual abuse.

Selected publications:

McNally, R. J. (2007). Betrayal trauma theory: A critical appraisal. Memory, 15, 280-294.

McNally, R. J. (2006). Cognitive abnormalities in post-traumatic stress disorder. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 271-277.

McNally, R. J. (2006). Let Freud rest in peace. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29, 526-527.

McNally, R. J. (2006). Psychiatric casualties of war. Science, 313, 923-924.

McNally, R. J., Perlman, C. A., Ristuccia, C. S., & Clancy, S. A. (2006). Clinical characteristics of adults reporting repressed, recovered, or continuous memories of childhood sexual abuse. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 74, 237-242.

McNally, R. J., Clancy, S. A., Barrett, H. M., Parker, H. A., Ristuccia, C. S., & Perlman, C. A. (2006). Autobiographical memory specificity in adults reporting repressed, recovered, or continuous memories of childhood sexual abuse. Cognition and Emotion, 20, 527-535.

McNally, R. J., Clancy, S. A., Barrett, H. M., & Parker, H. A. (2005). Reality monitoring in adults reporting repressed, recovered, or continuous memories of childhood sexual abuse. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 114, 147-152.

McNally, R. J., Ristuccia, C. S., & Perlman, C. A. (2005). Forgetting of trauma cues in adults reporting continuous or recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse. Psychological Science, 16, 336-340.

McNally, R. J. (2005). Debunking myths about trauma and memory. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 50, 817-822.

McNally, R. J., & Clancy, S. A. (2005). Sleep paralysis, sexual abuse, and space alien abduction. Transcultural Psychiatry, 42, 113-122.

McNally, R. J., Clancy, S. A., Barrett, H. M., & Parker, H. A. (2004). Inhibiting retrieval of trauma cues in adults reporting histories of childhood sexual abuse. Cognition and Emotion, 18, 479-493.

McNally, R. J., Lasko, N. B., Clancy, S. A., Macklin, M. L., Pitman, R. K., & Orr, S. P. (2004). Psychophysiologic responding during script-driven imagery in people reporting abduction by space aliens. Psychological Science, 15, 493-497.

McNally, R. J. (2003). Progress and controversy in the study of posttraumatic stress disorder. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 229-252.

McNally, R. J. (2003). Remembering trauma. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press.

Kihlstrom, J. F., McNally, R. J., Loftus, E. F., & Pope, H. G., Jr. (2005). The problem of child sexual abuse. Science, 309, 1182-1183. [Letter]

Parker, H. A., McNally, R. J., Nakayama, K., & Wilhelm, S. (2004). No disgust recognition deficit in obsessive-compulsive disorder. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 35, 183-192.

Vickers, K., & McNally, R. J. (2004). Panic disorder and suicide attempt in the National Comorbidity Survey. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 113, 582-591.

Nock, Matthew K. — I received my Ph.D. (2003) in psychology from Yale University and joined the faculty at Harvard the same year. The primary goals of my research are to better understand why people engage in self-injurious and aggressive behaviors, and to develop methods for better assessing and treating these behaviors. Toward this end, I conduct research using a range of methodological approaches (i.e., laboratory, clinic-based, and epidemiologic studies) to study behaviors such as suicide, non-suicidal self-injury, and physical aggression toward others. A related line of my research examines factors that mediate and moderate clinical change in psychological treatments. This work is focused on evaluating the influence of client factors (e.g., expectancies and motivation) on participation in treatment, as well as on the development of methods for increasing client treatment participation.

Selected publications:

Nock, M. K., & Banaji, M. R. (in press). Assessment of self-injurious thoughts using a behavioral test. American Journal of Psychiatry.

Wallenstein, M. B., & Nock, M. K. (2007). Physical exercise for the treatment of non-suicidal self-injury: Evidence from a single-case study. American Journal of Psychiatry, 164, 350-351.

Najmi, S., Wegner, D. M., & Nock, M. K. (2006). Thought suppression and self-injurious thoughts and behaviors. Behaviour Research and Therapy.

Nock, M. K., & Kessler, R. C. (2006). Prevalence of and risk factors for suicide attempts versus suicide gestures: Analysis of the National Comorbidity Survey. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 115, 616-623.

Nock, M. K., & Kazdin, A. E. (2005). Randomized controlled trial of a brief intervention for increasing participation in parent management training. Journal of Consulting and Clinical
Psychology, 73, 872-879.

Nock, M. K., & Prinstein (2005). Contextual features and behavioral functions of self-mutilation among adolescents. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 114, 140-146.

Nock, M. K., & Prinstein, M. J. (2004). A functional approach to the assessment of self-mutilative behavior. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 72, 885-890.

Nock, M. K., Goldman, J. L., Wang, Y., & Albano, A. M. (2004). From science to practice: The flexible use of evidence-based treatment procedures in clinical settings. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 43, 777-780.

Pizzagalli, Diego — Diego A. Pizzagalli received his MS (1995) and PhD (1998) from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Prof. Pizzagalli has a broad-based interest in affective neuroscience, particularly in utilizing neuroimaging (fMRI) and electrophysiological (EEG/ERP) techniques to gain a better understanding of the functional neuroanatomy of major depression and, more generally, emotion. In recent years, he has devoted his effort to parsing the heterogeneity of depression, and his research has shown that individual differences in treatment response, depression severity, anxiety symptoms, and different subtypes of depression are characterized by specific patterns of brain activation. A main goal of his research is to investigate the neurobiological underpinnings of anhedonia (loss of pleasure), which is an important trait marker of vulnerability to psychopathology. To this end, he has developed new objective approaches to measure subjects’ ability to modulate behavior as a function of their prior exposure to reward. Prof. Pizzagalli and his students are currently investigating the effects of genetic vulnerability and stress on these hedonic responses. Additional ongoing studies investigate brain mechanisms underlying emotional regulation and emotion-cognition interaction (e.g., how does emotionally laden feedback about one’s own performance modulate decision making) in healthy controls as well as at-risk subjects (e.g., remitted depressed subjects).

Selected Publications:

Functional neuroanatomy of depression:

Holmes, A.J., Pizzagalli, D.A. (2007) Task feedback effects on conflict monitoring and executive control: Relationship to subclinical measures of depression. Emotion, 7, 68-76.

Bogdan, R., Pizzagalli, D.A. (2006). Acute stress reduces hedonic capacity: Implications for depression. Biological Psychiatry, 60, 1147-1154.

Pizzagalli, D.A., Peccoralo, L.A., Davidson, R.J., Cohen, J.D. (2006). Resting anterior cingulate activity and abnormal responses to errors in subjects with elevated depressive symptoms: A 128-channel EEG study. Human Brain Mapping, 27, 185-201.

Pizzagalli, D.A., Jahn, A.L., O’Shea, J.P. (2005). Toward an objective characterization of an anhedonic phenotype: A Signal-detection approach. Biological Psychiatry, 57, 319-327.

Pizzagalli, D.A., Oakes, T.R., Fox, A.S., Chung, M.K., Larson, C.L., Abercrombie, H.C., Schaefer, S.M., Benca, R.M., Davidson, R.J. (2004). Functional but not structural subgenual prefrontal cortex abnormalities in melancholia. Molecular Psychiatry, 9, 393-405.

Pizzagalli DA, Oakes TR, Davidson RJ (2003). Coupling of theta activity and glucose metabolism in the human rostral anterior cingulate cortex: An EEG/PET study of normal and depressed subjects. Psychophysiology, 40, 939-949.

Pizzagalli, D.A., Nitschke, J.B., Oakes, T.R., Hendrick, A.M., Horras, K.A., Larson, C.L., Abercrombie, H.C., Schaefer, S.M., Koger, J.V., Benca, R.M., Pascual-Marqui, R.D., Davidson, R.J. (2002b). Brain electrical tomography in depression: The importance of symptom severity, anxiety, and melancholic features. Biological Psychiatry, 52, 73-85.

Pizzagalli, D., Pascual-Marqui, R.D., Nitschke, J.B., Oakes, T.R., Larson, C.L., Abercrombie, H.C., Schaefer, S.M., Koger, J.V., Benca, R.M., Davidson, R.J. (2001a). Anterior cingulate activity as a predictor of degree of treatment response in major depression: Evidence from brain electrical tomography analysis. American Journal of Psychiatry, 158, 405-415.

Davidson, R.J., Pizzagalli, D., Nitschke, J.B., Putman, K. (2002). Depression: Perspectives from affective neuroscience. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 545-574.

Spatio-temporal dynamics of brain mechanisms underlying affective processing:

Pizzagalli, D.A., Sherwood, R.J., Henriques, J.B., Davidson, R.J. (2005). Frontal brain asymmetry and reward responsiveness: A Source localization study. Psychological Science, 16, 805-813

Pizzagalli, D.A., Greischar, L.L., & Davidson, R.J. (2003). Spatio-temporal dynamics of brain mechanisms in aversive classical conditioning: High-density event-related potential and brain electrical tomography analyses. Neuropsychologia, 41, 184-194.

Pizzagalli, D.A., Lehmann, D., Hendrick, A.M., Regard, M., Pascual-Marqui, R.D., Davidson, R.J. (2002a). Affective judgments of faces modulate early activity (~160 ms) within the fusiform gyri. NeuroImage, 16, 663-677.