Vanessa Brown
Emory University, GA·Psychology
Anxiety disorders are common and can be disabling. One of their most harmful features is avoidance, steering clear of feared situations even when doing so costs something.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
anxiety
avoidance
computational psychiatry
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2030
What they work on
- Validate a new computational model of multi-step avoidance behavior by combining neural and behavioral data collected from people.
- Use the computational model to test how avoidance decisions differ in people with clinically impairing anxiety and avoidance.
- Test whether model-predicted avoidance correlates with, and causally influences, avoidance behavior in participants' real-world daily lives.
More about the research
Avoidance is poorly understood. Better treatment needs a theory of avoidance that can explain experimental findings and apply to both humans and other animals.
Why it matters
Avoidance drives much of the impairment in anxiety disorders, yet it is hard to measure and target. A validated computational measure of harmful avoidance could serve as a biomarker. It could help clinicians and researchers track whether treatments engage avoidance. It may also guide new therapies for people with anxiety and related disorders, with findings that can be compared across human and animal studies.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Damian Stanley
Adelphi University, NY·Psychology
Identify social computational phenotypes associated with mental health spectra in an exploratory online sample of 1,000 adults, combining computational models of social and nonsocial learning tasks with HiTOP symptom assessment.
Ligia Antezana
University of Pittsburgh, PA·Psychology·Early-career
Test whether behavioral markers of compulsivity during decision-making are associated with nonsuicidal self-injury in 90 autistic adults, using self-reports, clinical interviews and a decision-making task.
Emily Barkley-Levenson
Hofstra University, NY·Psychology
Test whether females aged 16-22 with restricting-type anorexia nervosa show greater aversion to ambiguous outcomes than matched healthy controls on a validated choice task that separates risky from ambiguous gambles.
The school
Emory University: 70 labs on PI Pages, $1.2B a year on research, 286 research doctorates a year.
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