Dr. Klein plans to admit a new graduate student pending approval of funding

 

The main focus of our lab is on the developmental psychopathology of emotional disorders, with a particular emphasis on depression. We are interested in early antecedents and risk factors, biomarkers, homotypic and heterotypic continuity, and mechanisms of comorbidity and intergenerational transmission.

Much of the work in our lab centers on an ongoing longitudinal study of early antecedents, risk factors and moderators and mediators of the development of mood and anxiety disorders in a large community sample of children. The children were assessed at ages 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 and 18; We recently started another wave of assessments at age 21. Subsets of the sample have also been involved in interim assessments. The study uses multiple measurement strategies to assess risk and mediating and moderating factors across multiple units of analysis, including child emotional reactivity and regulation, executive functioning, neural and behavioral measures of biases in processing emotional information, genes (polygenic risk scores derived from GWAS), stress and pubertal hormones, parenting, environmental and family stress, ecological momentary assessment of mood and interpersonal interactions, youth psychopathology, and parental personality and psychopathology.

We also collaborate on studies with other labs, including Dr. Roman Kotov’s longitudinal study of risk factors for depression in adolescent girls. Based in the Department of Psychiatry, this study uses many of the same measures and constructs that we are using with our cohort. In addition, we continue to work with data sets from our past studies, including a family and follow-up study of a large community sample of adolescents, a family and follow-up study of chronically depressed adult outpatients, and several multi-site clinical trials of the treatment of chronically depressed adults.