Aaron Mattfeld
Florida International University, FL·Neuroscience
Anxiety disorders and depression often take hold during adolescence, the same years when sleep patterns change dramatically and the brain reorganizes. One suspected link is a memory problem: people with anxiety tend to treat new, harmless situations as if they were earlier bad ones.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
- Topics
adolescent anxiety
negative overgeneralization
sleep neurophysiology
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2028
What they work on
- Test how the functional balance between the amygdala, which flags emotional significance, and the hippocampus relates to changes in sleep physiology across adolescence, using overnight polysomnography plus structural and functional MRI at three visits.
- Determine whether amygdalo-hippocampal function predicts changes in negative overgeneralization, the spread of bad memories onto similar harmless cues, using an emotional memory task and functional MRI collected across three waves.
- Link amygdalo-hippocampal function, sleep neurophysiology and negative overgeneralization to the trajectory of internalizing symptom severity, using detailed clinical assessments repeated every 18 months in 220 youth spanning a range of anxiety.
- Follow four age cohorts in an accelerated longitudinal design, retaining 140 participants and recruiting 80 more, to map maturation from peri-adolescence through mid-late adolescence within individuals rather than across separate groups.
More about the research
This work asks how sleep and brain maturation together shape that tendency, and whether an imbalance between two brain structures explains why anxiety symptoms escalate across the teenage years.
Why it matters
Anxiety and depression commonly begin in adolescence, yet treatments are rarely targeted at the developmental processes that drive them. By tracking the same teens through sleep recordings, brain imaging and clinical assessment, this work could identify when and how the balance between emotion and memory circuits goes awry. Such measures may serve as early biomarkers of risk and point to interventions, including sleep-focused ones, delivered during a window when symptoms are still forming.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Madhukar Trivedi
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Investigate how the amount of social media use and positive or negative online experiences affect depression, anxiety and suicidal ideation trajectories over six months in 100 at-risk Texas youth.
Alexandra Cohen
Emory University, GA·Psychology·Early-career
Test how emotions triggered by wins and losses in a probabilistic reinforcement learning task affect memory and dopamine- and norepinephrine-linked brain function, comparing children, adolescents and adults.
Philip Kragel
Emory University, GA·Neuroscience
Evaluate whether different superior colliculus pathways serve distinct functions, using machine learning models of brain connectivity while people perform avoidance learning, spatial attention and aversive-viewing tasks during fMRI.
The school
Florida International University: 9 labs on PI Pages, $326M a year on research, 264 research doctorates a year.
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