Laura Egan

• Doctor of Philosophy
• PostDoc Position at Queens College, CUNY

Youth at risk for negative health outcomes due to reduced access to social, mental health, and educational support systems are in particular need of resources promoting social-emotional resilience and positive educational outcomes. A growing body of research documents the positive benefits of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs), but few studies...

Exaggerated attention to threatening information, or the threat bias, has been implicated in the development and maintenance of anxiety disorders. Recent research has highlighted methodological limitations in threat bias measures, such as temporal insensitivity, leading to the development of novel metrics that capture change and variability in thre...

Sensitivity to emotional context is an emerging construct for characterizing adaptive or maladaptive emotion regulation, but few measurement approaches exist. The current study combined behavioral and neurocognitive measures to assess context sensitivity in relation to self-report measures of adaptive emotional flexibility and well-being. Sixty-six...

The Hick-Hyman law describes a linear increase in reaction time (RT) as a function of the information entropy of response selection, which is computed as the binary logarithm of the number of response alternatives. While numerous behavioral studies have provided evidence for the Hick-Hyman law, its neural underpinnings have rarely been examined and...

We examined the neural substrates of fear memory formation and maintenance when repeated recall was used to prevent forgetting in young animals. In contrast to adult rats, juveniles failed to show contextual fear responses at 4 d post-fear conditioning. Reconsolidation sessions 3 and 6 d after conditioning restored contextual fear responses in juve...

Cognitive control refers to the processes that permit selection and prioritization of information processing in different cognitive domains to reach the capacity-limited conscious mind. Although previous studies have suggested that the capacity of cognitive control itself is limited, a direct quantification of this capacity has not been attempted....

Cognitive control refers to the processes that permit selection and prioritization of information processing in different cognitive domains to reach the capacity-limited conscious mind. Although previous studies have suggested that the capacity of cognitive control itself is limited, a direct quantification of this capacity has not been attempted....

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a pervasive neurodevelopmental condition, affecting cognition and behavior throughout the life span. With recent advances in neuroimaging techniques and analytical approaches, a considerable effort has been directed toward identifying the neuroanatomical underpinnings of ASD. While gray-matter abnormalities have be...

The efficacy of attention bias modification training (ABMT) for anxiety is debated, in part because individual differences in task engagement and pre-training threat bias impact training efficacy. In the present study, an engaging, gamified ABMT mobile application, or "app," was utilized in 42 (21 females) trait-anxious adults. EEG was recorded dur...

Prenatal stress affects a range of health outcomes in both the mother and developing fetus (Glover, 2014). Cost-effective and easily-accessible treatments to reduce such stress are needed for pregnant women. Computerized attention bias modification training (ABMT) is one such treatment approach. ABMT capitalizes on research identifying exaggerated...