Welcome to ADAPT Lab
Affect Dynamics and Personalized Therapeutics
What are the roots of externalizing psychopathology?
How could basic research and naturalistic methods enhance the understanding of its etiology and the development of new strategies for prevention and treatment of these disorders?
Our Research Focus
Externalizing problems including anger, aggression, and conduct behaviors are of the most common reasons for referrals of youth to mental health treatment, associated with functional impairment across multiple domains (interpersonal, academic, occupational), and increased risk for both psychopathology and criminal behaviors.
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Our lab explores potential mechanisms that underlie the development of externalizing problems, operating across brain, cognition, behavior, and environment.
We utilize multi-method approach including behavioral, physiological, and ecological real-time paradigms and technology-based tools. Leveraging these tools, we investigate naturally occurring, real-time dynamics of externalizing symptoms in children, youth, and adults’ daily life. Based on this knowledge, we aim to develop mechanism-informed, just-in-time, personalized interventions that could be disseminated in large-scale.
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Our research areas of interests include:
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The developmental course and outcomes of externalizing problems in children and adolescents.
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Identifying mechanisms of risk by examining the neuro-cognitive, behavioral, and environmental correlates of externalizing problems.
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Exploring the dynamics and the temporal, context-depended nuances of externalizing problems as they naturally occur in the individual’s daily life.
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Developing and advancing personalized treatment approaches for mental health.
Research Areas
Understanding the Nature of Externalizing Psychopathology
Studying the mechanisms underlying anger, irritability, and aggression to identifying physiological and cognitive-behavioural- markers implicated in the development and maintenance of externalizing psychopathology.
In our study, we are using different methods (EEG, fMRI, autonomic system recording, eye-tracking, cognitive and behavioral paradigms, ecological momentary assessment) to identify reliable targets and establish their association with externalizing psychopathology.
Mapping Longitudinal Outcomes of Youth Irritability, Anger, and Aggression
Exploring developmental trajectories, risk and resiliance factors that would predict changes in externalizing symptoms over time and later outcomes.
In addition, we are studying environmental factors (e.g., cultural, social, interpersonal, context) and their influences on youth’s psychopathology and function.
Real-time, Naturalistic Measurement
Aiming to capture temporal dynamics and real-time presentations of externalizing symptoms as occur in the “real world”, our lab incorporates digital tools and technology-based platforms to measure individual’s affect and behaviours in their daily life across naturalistic settings.
Developing Interventions Aiming to Reduce Clinical Symptoms
Our lab is focused on leveraging accumulating knowledge on markers underlying externalizing psychopathology, to develop mechanism-informed interventions and transdiagnostic approaches to probe and test for clinical utility in randomized controlled trials.
