Saren Seeley

Mood and anxiety disorders; emotion regulation; attention; psychophysiology; neuroimaging

I am a first-year clinical neuroscience student in Mary-Frances O'Connor's Grief, Loss, and Social Stress (GLASS) Lab. Prior to beginning the PhD program at UA, I spent three years as a research assistant in Douglas Mennin's Regulation of Emotion in Anxiety and Depression Lab (readlab.info) where I managed an fMRI study of emotion regulation and response to treatment in generalized anxiety disorder. I also studied cognitive/affective processes in anxiety and depression (e.g., worry; conflict adaptation; autonomic dysregulation), using methods including heart rate variability, evoked cardiac responses, electrogastrography, and reaction time paradigms. My research interests center on the interactive nature of relationships between cognition, motivation, and emotion, and the context(s) in which these relationships can give rise to distress and impairment. I am particularly interested in processes such as yearning (in complicated grief), worry, rumination and other forms of self-focused thought that lie on a spectrum of normative to pathological - yet in the latter instance, can profoundly impact health, functioning and well-being. I am also interested in novel methods for emotion/regulation elictation and assessment using behavioral and psychophysiological measures.