Meghan Vinograd

Background Recent studies in both human and experimental animals have identified fragmented and unpredictable parental and environmental signals as a novel source of early‐life adversity. Early‐life unpredictability may be a fundamental developmental factor that impacts brain development, including reward and emotional memory circuits, affecting th...

Background: Anhedonia, the reduction of pleasure and reward-seeking behaviour, is a transdiagnostic symptom with well-described neural circuit mediators. Although typically observed during disease state, extant hypotheses suggest that anhedonia may also be an early risk factor for development of psychopathology. Understanding the contribution of a...

Anhedonia, the reduction of pleasure and reward-seeking behavior, is a transdiagnostic construct associated with a range of important health outcomes. As with other psychiatric disorders, anhedonia is a relatively common, though understudied, feature of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that is not adequately targeted by existing treatments. The...

Depression is both prevalent and costly, and many individuals do not adequately respond to existing psychopharmacological and behavioral interventions. The current article describes the use of neuroscience in augmenting behavioral interventions for depression in two primary areas: anhedonia and cognitive deficits/biases. Neuroscience research has i...

Neuroticism has been associated with depression and anxiety both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Interpretive bias has been associated with depression and anxiety, primarily in cross-sectional and bias induction studies. The purpose of the current study was to examine the role of interpretive bias as a prospective risk factor and a mediator o...

Although blunted sensitivity to reward is thought to play a key role in promoting risk for depression, most research on this topic has utilized monetary reward paradigms and focused on currently depressed adults. To address this issue, we analyzed neural reward and β-endorphin data from the Psychobiology of Stress and Adolescent Depression (PSY SAD...

Background Elevated defensive responding, through startle reflex (SR) and skin conductance response (SCR), may contribute to onset and maintenance of depression and anxiety. Most work examining SR and SCR has predicted psychiatric diagnoses. There is a paucity of research examining links between SR or SCR and dimensional measures of psychopathology...

Prior research has struggled to differentiate cortisol stress response patterns reflective of well-regulated versus dysregulated hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis function among adolescents. Here, we show how exploring profiles of joint HPA– inflammatory stress responsivity, and linking those profiles to pubertal development and peer stress...

Altered functioning of the brain’s threat and reward circuitry has been linked to early life adversity and to symptoms of anxiety and depression. To date, however, these relationships have been studied in isolation and in categorical-based approaches. It is unclear to what extent early life adversity and psychopathology have unique effects on brain...

Depression is a common, often recurrent disorder that causes substantial disease burden worldwide, and this is especially true for women following the pubertal transition. According to the Social Signal Transduction Theory of Depression, stressors involving social stress and rejection, which frequently precipitate major depressive episodes, induce...

Dimensional models of anxiety and depression highlight common and distinct symptom clusters that are thought to reflect disruptions in underlying functional processes. The current study investigated how functioning of threat neurocircuitry relates to symptom dimensions of anxiety and depression. Participants were aged 18-19 years (n = 229, 158 fema...

Sharing specific autobiographical events is likely to influence the support people give us; a person who shares little detail of their lives may be unlikely to attract social support and this may in turn contribute towards anxious and depressive symptoms. Participants (N = 142) reported memories evoked by negative and positive cue words and these m...

Background: Anxiety and depression are highly comorbid possibly because they share a common core of general distress or negative affect. Consistent with this viewpoint, Prenoveau and colleagues (2010) identified a broad general factor common to both anxiety and depression (general distress), two factors of intermediate breadth (anhedonia and fears)...

The present study examined the relation between early life adversity and working memory among young adults. We found that the number of overall major adversities significantly predicted impaired working memory for neutral stimuli, while the number of instances of abuse significantly predicted impaired working memory for negative stimuli.

Chapter 5 describes the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework as it pertains to emotion regulation, an in-progress research framework mapping psychological constructs onto discrete units of analysis (genes, molecules, cells, brain circuits, physiology, behavior, and self-report). It accommodates contemporary and developing emotion frameworks su...