Lab Projects

Cognitive Assessment of Depression and Anxiety

This project is examining information processing in depression and anxiety using a battery of information processing tasks designed to assess different levels of cognition (i.e., cognitive structures, propositions, operations, and products). To assess these levels of cognition, the project uses the Cognitive Assessment Battery (CAB) which examines processes such as memory, attention, and interpretational patterns. The project is currently examining subclinically depressed and anxious individuals, as well as clinically depressed patients.

Attachment, Bonding, and Vulnerability

This study examines how attachment and bonding patterns to parents may be related to vulnerability to negative affective states such as depression and anxiety. The affect of transient mood states on several information processing tasks is assessed in people who are either low or average in their attachment/bonding patterns.

Affective Interference in Depression -- a neural network formulation

Attention biases in depression are investigated using an affective lexical decision task and an affective valence-identification experiment. A computational neural network model of affective information processing is used which can be made to simulate normal and depressive performance on both tasks. Results suggest that depressed people selectively attend to, and ruminate upon the negative aspects stimuli in their environment.

Correlates of Parental Depression on Negative Information Processing

This project examines the information processing consequences of negative communication patterns for adults raised by depressed parents. Specifically, the effects of these patterns on negative schemas of oneself and others, coping styles, and social support patterns are being assessed.

Representation in information processing biases

Examines differential performance of depressed and nondepressed people on an affective Stroop task and a Sternberg memory task. One version of each of the tasks uses affectively valenced words as stimuli. Another version uses affectively valenced pictures as stimuli.

Ethnic Experience and Psychopathology

Examines the relationship between various aspects of ethnic experiences and measures of depression and anxiety. Ongoing projects are assessing whether different aspects of ethnic background such as ethnic identify, perceptions of discrimination, and group affiliation are related to different patterns of depression and anxiety. This project is being done in collaboration with Dr. Vanessa Malcarne and her research group at SDSU.

Past Depression Symptomatology

As part of our efforts to examine vulnerability to depression, this project is in the process of developing a measure of the number of depressive symptoms that have been experienced in the past. Hopefully this can be used to investigate individuals who are at particular risk for depression by virtue of experiencing a number of past symptoms.

Information Processing and Affective Correlates of Sexual and Physical Abuse

There are a number of projects that are emanating from a large data base that lab has collected on undergraduate students who report that they were either sexually or physically abused. Some projects include investigation of possible repression of memories of abuse, the link between abuse patterns and bonding with parents, and the relationship between different patterns of past abuse and current depression add dissociation.

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