Abidin Early Career Award Update

Abidin Early Career Award Update

By Dylan Gee, PhD
2020 Abidin Award Winner

By Dylan Gee, PhD
2020 Abidin Award Winner

Particularly given my great respect for the work of SCCAP, I was very honored to receive the Abidin Award and am excited to share an update on the research my lab has been conducting with support from this award. 

Our research in the Clinical Affective Neuroscience & Development Lab (CANDLab) examines how early experiences shape youth mental health. More specifically, we aim to 1) characterize typical and atypical neurodevelopmental changes related to emotional learning and regulation; 2) elucidate how early-life stress impacts neurodevelopment and identify factors that promote risk versus resilience related to mental health; and 3) translate this knowledge to optimize interventions for youth with anxiety and stress-related disorders and those who are at risk due to early adversity.

With support from the Abidin Award, a line of recent work in the lab has focused on the substantial heterogeneity in stress exposure itself and in developmental trajectories among stress-exposed youth. Identifying specific factors that may moderate the association between stress exposure and subsequent vulnerability has the potential to enhance early identification of risk and provide unique insight into approaches to tailoring interventions based on key features of stress exposure, developmental stage, or a child’s current environment. Given dynamic changes in corticolimbic circuitry that supports fear extinction and emotion regulation, my lab has been especially interested in the ways that experiential and temporal aspects of stress relate to the development of corticolimbic circuitry and affective behavior. Emily Cohodes, a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology, has played a leading role in this work and proposed a framework that generates testable hypotheses about how specific dimensions of stress exposure (e.g., caregiver involvement, controllability, predictability) interact with developmental stage to influence corticolimbic circuitry (Cohodes et al., 2021). As part of my proposal for the Abidin Award, we have been developing an interview-based measure to assess key dimensions of stress exposure based on this conceptual framework. With support from the award, we were able to administer this measure with over 150 participants. Emily has been leading the development and validation of this dimensional trauma assessment, which will be published shortly (Cohodes et al., in press). We hope that this ongoing work will facilitate investigations of the associations between factors including developmental timing, type, caregiver involvement, predictability, and controllability of stress exposure with outcomes across multiple levels including corticolimbic development, behavior related to emotional learning and regulation, and psychopathology.

In our next steps, we are taking complementary approaches to empirically testing key predictions about specific facets of stress exposure and development. In one line of work, we are applying data-driven approaches with the goal to more precisely parse heterogeneity in associations between stress exposure, brain development, and mental health. As one example, using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, work led by Lucinda Sisk, a neuroscience Ph.D. candidate in the CANDLab, and Seok-Jun Hong showed that effectively parsing heterogeneity in between brain structure and environmental factors via a data-driven approach enhanced the prediction of later mental health symptoms in youth (Hong & Sisk et al., 2021). In a second line of work, we are using laboratory-based experimental paradigms to better isolate the effects associated with specific dimensions of stress exposure. As one example, we are examining age-related changes in the effects of stressor controllability on corticolimbic circuitry and coping behavior, with the hypothesis that control may be especially beneficial for promoting resilience during adolescence.

It is my hope that further delineating the developmental neurobiology of emotional learning and regulation and how they are modulated by environmental factors can help us to better understand risk for psychopathology and inform interventions for youth. In the longer term, our research will aim to translate the knowledge gained from these studies to tailor the type and timing of interventions to reflect the biological state of the developing brain, with a primary goal to promote resilience among children exposed to adversity. I am very grateful to SCCAP and Dick Abidin for the pivotal support of this work!