Yale Clinical Affective Neuroscience and Development Lab

12/30/2025

[HOME STUDY] Want to help advance research on how technology can support psychological well-being?
Researchers at Yale are conducting a study on how a technological device can support the practice of deep breathing for anxiety reduction. We’re looking for teens (ages 13–17) to participate in a home-based study using the device in their everyday environment for 3-5 weeks.
Participants will complete brief surveys, interviews, and interact with the device regularly as part of the study. Compensation up to $200 is available for full participation.
Interested? Fill out the short eligibility form here: tinyurl.com/yale-breathing-study

Contact: [email protected]

06/12/2024

[REMOTE STUDY] Do you want to contribute to research on children’s emotional development?

The Clinical Affective Neuroscience & Development Lab at Yale is looking to learn about how parents support their children’s emotion regulation. We are looking for parents and children to participate in a two-week remote study completing daily surveys. Child participants must be between 6 to 17 years old for both parent and child to be eligible. Parents can earn up to $105 and children can earn up to $45 for your participation!

Interested? Fill out this survey: https://tinyurl.com/candlab

Principal Investigator: Dr. Dylan Gee

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 203-432-1316

08/29/2022

For this week, we are highlighting a recent publication that our principal investigator and several researchers from other institutions collaborated to produce. These researchers identified a few challenges that face the next generation of clinical scientists, taking into account the strengths and weaknesses of present training practices.

They collected anonymous survey responses from nearly 600 clinical psychology Ph.D. students and faculty members at research-intensive programs and identified nine main challenges. Briefly, these challenges were labeled as follows:

1. An increasingly technical and multidisciplinary field → psychology has the opportunity to rely on a spectrum of technical tools that overlap amongst a variety of disciplines, yet the access to these tools is variable as well as the perceived utility of these tools; thus, the solution would be to increase access and clarity regarding the education of these resources
2. Dual training → psychology as a discipline needs to improve in the ways it integrates the clinical science and practice
3. Misalignment between training and jobs → sometimes the training that students receive is fixated on skills that are not necessarily applicable to the respective professions that they intend to conduct
4. Student financial strains → student financial debt is a major barrier and concern for highly qualified students to pursue these academic and professional paths and the solution is to increase student compensation from a variety of sources to open access
5. Systemic inequities and inadequate training → the workforce needs to diversify and target mental health inequities that arise from this lack of diversification as well as the unique struggles that marginalized populations will experience
6. Student health and wellbeing → institutions need to take proper accountability to promote student well-being through structural means
7. Heavy student and workload → part of this prior challenge of well-being means restructuring programs to allot reasonable timelines to ensure the quality of the care that these professionals are being trained to offer
8. Insufficient data for recursive refinement → it's difficult to return to prior practices and appropriately revise them for improvements because there are not enough data streams that have been collected for reflection; the simple solution to this is to develop evidence-based standards for training through the creation of new data streams
9. Systemic headwinds → faculty are some of the most valuable resources to pushing for these changes, yet they are frequently burdened by similar issues facing students; the solution to this is to craft student-faculty solidarity to achieve these goals as well as pushing institutions to create protected time for these groups to collaborate and improve the state of affairs

We strongly recommend reading the original publication (linked below), which goes far more in-depth with each of these points and recommendations!

Gee, D.G., DeYoung, K.M., McLaughlin, K.A., Tillman, R.M., Barch, D.M., Forbes, E.E., Krueger, R.F., Strauman, T.J., Weierich, M.R., Shackman, A.J. (2022). Training the Next Generation of Clinical Psychological Scientists: A Data-Driven Call to Action. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 18, 43-70.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9086080/

08/22/2022

Jordan Foster (he/him) is the next lab member we’re introducing and he is one of our PhD students. Right now he is in his second year in the Clinical Psychology program. One of his research interests is how perceptions of early experiences shape behavioral and neurobiological development. A fun fact about Jordan is that he taught at a circus camp for two years! Try to guess what he taught! Thank you so much for learning more about another one of our members, we look forward to continuing to introduce you to more of our lab. :-)

08/18/2022

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08/04/2022

Next up is Gabrielle Martin! Gabi is a summer undergraduate research assistant in the CANDLab and she is visiting from Howard University as a part of the SURF program. She is interested in neurobiological and endocrine interactions, particularly how these kinds of interactions impact communities of color.

This summer, she assisted in research on associations among trauma exposure, psychopathology, and fronto-limbic circuitry in young adults. Gabi found that when trauma occurred through the ages of 0-9 years old, there was an associated increase in adult anxiety and depression symptoms. In addition, trauma between the ages of 10-14 years old was associated with increased resting state functional connectivity of the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). With this correlated activity, there may be stronger connectivity between the amygdala, which is typically involved in the experience and expression of emotions, and the mPFC, which supports various social cognitive functions. Trauma severity was not correlated with depressive/anxious symptoms or resting state functional connectivity of the amygdala and mPFC.

These findings are very interesting and we’re so proud of the work that Gabi did with our team this summer! We can’t wait to see how Gabi continues to grow in her future studies as well as how others can learn from this work. We’re so grateful we had the chance to spend this summer with Gabi!

Thank you so much for taking the time to check out some of the work that we’ve been up to this summer. :-)

08/01/2022

This week we are highlighting the exciting work of our two summer undergraduate research assistants! First is Belle!

Belle is one of our summer undergraduate research assistants visiting from Sewanee: The University of the South! We’re so glad to have Belle here and to share the research that she has produced with our lab this summer. In her research, she explored the effect of stressor controllability and anxiety on physiological and self-reported stress. Among participants without prior control in a task, those with anxiety disorders had increased physiological responses in comparison to those who did not have anxiety disorders. Among participants who had prior control, there was no significant difference in physiological response.

In the future, Belle is interested in the ways in which pediatric psychology can be applied and disseminated amongst the medical field, specifically in hospital settings. We’re so lucky to have had the chance to work with Belle this summer and to get to learn from her exciting research! We’re excited to see where Belle goes in the future with her endeavors. :-)

07/27/2022

Welcome to the Clinical Affective Neuroscience & Development Lab at Yale! We invite you to help us understand how the brain works! Children, teens, and young adults (ages 6-30) are invited to participate in research to help us understand how the brain develops and how we think and learn about emotions. You can receive up to $365 for participation, and this is a fun way for people of all ages to get involved in science! Learn more by visiting our website (candlab.yale.edu). Parents and adults can contact us at [email protected] or (203) 432-1316 if interested in participating, and we look forward to meeting you!

07/27/2022

The CANDLab's studies on neural mechanisms of symptom reduction in psychosocial treatments for youth with anxiety disorders and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were recently featured in an article by Dr. Randi Epstein in the Yale Alumni Maganize. The lab is examining how children's brains change as their anxiety is treated through a parent-based treatment in collaboration with Dr. Eli Lebowitz's group and how trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy helps to strengthen emotion regulation and reduce symptoms of PTSD in collaboration with Dr. Carla Stover's group at the Yale Child Study Center. You can read more here!

Innovative programs at the School of Medicine offer help for children scarred by trauma.

07/21/2022

Today we’re introducing Janice Dean, who is one of our undergraduate research assistants. Janice is graduating this year and works with processing the data for our Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE) clinical trial as well as conducting phone screens for research participation eligibility. Some of Janice’s research interests include the ways in which social and cultural buffers to psychopathological development can be implemented in the educational system. Super grateful for all the work Janice does in the lab!

07/18/2022

Today, we're going to be highlighting one of the studies we published in 2021. The TLDR is that when people engage in maladaptive behaviors, it worsens symptoms and the second takeaway is that some regions of the brain could predict some anxious and depressive symptoms in the face of a prolonged stressful event, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

We understand that the COVID-19 pandemic worsened anxiety and depression symptoms, but we don't fully understand what specific factors may help lessen this negative impact. We addressed two main factors: one biological and one behavioral factor. We analyzed whether adaptive or maladaptive coping strategies changed the way that symptoms developed over the pandemic. We also analyzed how certain brain regions and how they operated before the pandemic may have impacted these symptoms, with a focus on regions that we often see playing a major role in anxious and depressive symptoms.

Unsurprisingly, when individuals engaged in maladaptive coping strategies, those behaviors were associated with more severe anxious arousal symptoms during the pandemic. More specifically, less self-distraction and more self-blame were two major symptoms that were particularly present in conjunction with these maladaptive coping strategies.

Additionally, two regions of the brain seemed to have effects on the symptoms that individuals experienced. First, when a reduced insula thickness was observed prior to the pandemic, there were more severe anxious arousal symptoms. Second, it seemed as if the combination of self-distraction and amygdala volume factors were able to predict anhedonia symptoms, which refers to a category of symptoms related to a lack of pleasure.

If you would like to see more details and read some more on what this study means for the future, definitely check out the work that our team did! The article title is "Coping Strategies, Neural Structure, and Depression and Anxiety During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Longitudinal Study in a Naturalistic Sample Spanning Clinical Diagnoses and Subclinical Symptoms"

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34604834/

07/11/2022