Faculty Research Interests

EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOPATHOLOGY AND CLINICAL

 
Hooker, Christine — 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 Ed.) Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Hooley, J. M. “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.

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.

Recent publications include:

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.

Nock, Matthew K. — Matthew K. Nock received a PhD (2003) in psychology from Yale University and joined the faculty at Harvard the same year. The primary goals of his 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, he conducts 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 his 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.

Recent publications include:

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.

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).

Recent publications include:

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.