Dr. Klein plans to admit a new graduate student pending approval of funding.
We will give priority to applicants with a strong interest in the development and course of depression in adolescents and young adults who are interested in analyzing longitudinal data and writing papers from the two studies described below.

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, classification and subtypes, biomarkers, homotypic and heterotypic continuity, and mechanisms of comorbidity and intergenerational transmission. Much of the work in our lab centers on two ongoing longitudinal studies.

The Stony Brook Temperament Study investigates 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, and are currently being assessed again at age 21. 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.

The Adolescent Development of Emotions and Personality Traits study, co-led with Dr. Roman Kotov, investigates antecedents and pathways to, and the course of, depression in a large sample of early adolescent girls. The sample has been followed on six occasions, from age 14 through 20, and is currently being reassessed at age 25. This study assesses many of the same constructs, and uses a number of the same measures, as the Stony Brook Temperament Study.  In the current wave of assessments, we are focusing on parsing the heterogeneity of depression by examining factors that distinguish individuals with brief and infrequent episodes of depression from those with very frequent or persistent depression.