News

08.2022 Dr. Goldfarb just received an R21 from the National Institutes of Mental Health to study neural mechanisms of stress effects across hippocampal encoding and prediction. We are delighted to work with Co-I Nick Turk-Browne to follow up on the exciting work that Brynn Sherman started during her PhD!

06.02.2022

The CAMS Lab is happy to host Elaine Wijaya (Yale) and Arianna Rodriguez-Rivera (UPR) as Wu Tsai Undergraduate Summer Scholars!

06.01.2022

We are delighted to welcome Dawn Nguyen, new PGA in the CAMS Lab. Dawn joins us after completing her BA at Emory College where she worked in the Hamann Cognitive Neuroscience Lab.

05.31.2022

Sad to say goodbye to the first member of the CAMS Lab, but know she is off to great things at UCLA. We’ll miss you, Bailey!

05.2022

A new collaboration with Dustin Scheinost and Yale Stress Center colleagues Nia Fogelman, Dongju Seo, and Rajita Sinha was just published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging. Given the close and bidirectional association between stress and drinking, we asked whether drinking history changes the way that people’s brains process and predict emotional stress responses. Using connectome-based predictive modeling, we showed that we could predict emotional stress equally well for light and risky drinkers. We then used a data-driven approach to uncover anatomical and functional distinctions in which parts of the brain contributed to these predictions for our two groups. We found that stress was driven by visuomotor networks for risky drinkers, whereas frontoparietal and default mode networks drove this response in lighter drinkers. Furthermore, the networks that predicted stress among risky drinkers could also predict subsequent drinking behavior after the scan. These results highlight potential adaptations in stress-related brain circuitry among high-risk drinkers and the malleability of the brain processes that govern stress responses. Big thank you to Dr. Koob for highlighting this work in the NIAAA Director’s Report.

02.08.2022

Bailey will be joining David Clewett’s lab at UCLA for her PhD in cognitive psychology! We will miss her and are so excited for her.

01.13.2022

Dr. Goldfarb received a Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science. This award recognizes researchers whose innovative work has already advanced the field and signals great potential for their continued contributions.

10.01.2021

Fifteen months after starting the lab – so happy to see everyone at our first in person lab meeting!

09.01.2021

Welcome to Sanghoon Kang, new PGA in the CAMS Lab! Sanghoon joins us after completing his BA at Seoul National University where he worked in Dr. Woo-Young Ahn’s Computational Clinical Science Lab.

08.26.2021

Dr. Goldfarb received a NARSAD Young Investigator Award! Looking forward to some exciting new directions extending our habit work to PTSD.

08.19.2021

Congratulations to Bailey Harris, who presented a poster featuring work on biased memory for alcohol-related events in the first annual Yale PGA Research Symposium!

04.2021

A new collaboration with Liz Phelps’ lab and Joey Dunsmoor was just published in Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. Based on rodent models and learning theory, we asked whether the way that someone learns an aversive experience changes their ability to learn that parts of this experience are now safe. With over 100 participants in a three-day protocol, we had people learn that a square and tone cue each separately predicted that they would receive an electric shock (elemental) or that the square and tone together predicted shock (configural). Then, they learned that the tone no longer predicted shock. We found that configural learners could generalize this safety learning from the tone to the square, but elemental learners could not. These results highlight the limits of safety generalization, a crucial part of exposure therapy, and suggest new techniques to help with maladaptive fear responses in PTSD.

10.01.2020

Welcome to Bailey Harris, the inaugural PGA in the CAMS Lab! Bailey joins us from University of Denver, where she completed her BA and worked in Dr. Kim Chiew’s Motivation, Affect, and Cognition Lab.

9.25.2020

Dr. Goldfarb wrote a piece about how the stress experienced by research participants (both during the pandemic and more generally) can influence the neural and behavioral data that we collect, underscoring the importance of using subjective, neuroendocrine, and autonomic assays to carefully measure stress in our participants. Check out her Comment in Nature Reviews Neuroscience

07.01.2020

Introducing the Cognitive Neuroscience of Affect, Memories & Stress (CAMS) Lab!