Anna Weinberg
Department of Psychology
McGill University
Canada
Biography
My research focuses on identifying biological pathways that give rise to disordered emotional experience. This involves using multiple methodologies, most often event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the activity of neural systems devoted to processing errors, emotional stimuli, and rewards, and working to establish reliable links between the function of these systems and behavior in healthy populations. With this basic research as a foundation, I seek to identify multiple abnormalities in these systems that characterize emotional dysfunction in a range of mood and anxiety (i.e., internalizing) disorders. In particular, I am interested in patterns of neural response that respect diagnostic boundaries between anxiety and unipolar mood disorders, and those which reflect more general liabilities that cut across disorders. However, it is not clear whether abnormalities in these systems contribute to the initial occurrence of an illness or emerge following onset. My recent efforts aim to establish whether these biological correlates of anxiety and depression represent stable vulnerability factors, or whether variation is instead linked to fluctuations in symptom severity.
Research Interest
Social & Personality
Publications
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Weinberg, A., Venables, N.C., Proudfit, G.H., Patrick, C.J. (in press) Heritability of the Neural Response to Emotional Pictures: Evidence from ERPs in an Adult Twin Sample. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 10, 424-434.
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Weinberg, A., Kotov, R., & Proudfit, G.H. (2015). Neural indicators of error processing in Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and Major Depressive Disorder. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 124, 172-185.
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Weinberg, A., Liu, H., Hajcak, G., & Shankman, S.A. (in press). Blunted neural response to rewards as a vulnerability factor for anhedonic depression: Results from a family study. Journal of Abnormal Psychology.
