The role of providing care for a loved one with Alzheimer’s disease can expose friends and family caregivers to significant stress over an extended period of time, resulting in a host of negative outcomes like increased depression and anxiety, and diminished quality of life. However, previous studies have found that...
Global dementia diagnoses are steeply increasing. While advances in neuroimaging, neuropathology, and genetics research have improved our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases causing dementia, precise antemortem diagnosis, as well as sensitive and specific biomarkers that can facilitate a differential diagnosis and aid in participant recruitment in clinical trials, remains elusive. The...
Breast cancer patients have reported nonspecific neurologic symptoms such as fatigue, depression, and cognitive concerns while undergoing adjuvant therapy. Few neuroimaging studies have examined hormone therapy, an adjuvant therapy, and more research is needed to determine possible neurologic and cognitive effects. Previous estrogen research has found alterations in gray matter...
Objective: To evaluate patient-reported experiences of telehealth and disparities in access, use, and satisfaction with telehealth visits during the COVID-19 pandemic (aim 1), to evaluate prevalence of portal use pre-, peri-, and post-pandemic, among the C3 cohort, and investigate any disparities in use by sociodemographic factors (aim 2), and to...
The predominant, categorical system used to classify and diagnose psychiatric disorders suffers from several critical scientific limitations, including extensive comorbidity, unreliability, and disorder heterogeneity. As such, clinical psychological scientists are increasingly moving away from this traditional, categorical system, and toward empirically-based, dimensional, and transdiagnostic alternatives such as the Hierarchical Taxonomy...
Motor abnormalities (e.g., dyskinesia, psychomotor slowing, neurological soft signs) are core features of schizophrenia observed from the premorbid period through chronic illness, suggesting motor dysfunction may reflect the pathophysiology of psychosis. Among this list of motor abnormalities, psychomotor slowing in particular is one of the most consistently observed and robust...
Gerotranscendence involves feelings of coherence with one’s sense of self, greater acceptance of one’s own life, and connectedness to others across time and space. Gerotranscendence is thought to increase with age. The present study is the first longitudinal effort to investigate changes in gerotranscendence across late midlife using life story...
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a heritable, neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by social impairments and restricted and repetitive behaviors (American Psychiatric Association, 2013; Tick, Bolton, Happe, Rutter, & Rijsdijk, 2016), with a subset of first-degree relatives demonstrating a constellation of subclinical traits that are qualitatively similar to the defining features of...
Stress, trauma exposure, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are associated with chronic health conditions. In the U.S., women of color face trauma at up to four times the national rate. They also contend with chronic stress from the intersectional hardships of racism, discrimination, sexism, and economic hardship that is the...
Emotional processing deficits are characteristic of psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. However, impairments as such are not well understood prior to the onset of psychosis among individuals at clinical high-risk (CHR). This dissertation draws from prominent theories of emotion in schizophrenia and seeks to investigate the experience and expression of...