About the talk:
Learning theory has motivated conceptualizations of clinically impairing anxiety for a century. Yet, despite this theoretical model’s successes in understanding and treating anxiety, many predictions from a standard learning theory account of anxiety are not supported by empirical findings. Instead, a revised learning theory account, incorporating neurocomputational modeling of uncertainty, has the potential to explain altered learning patterns and treatment mechanisms in anxiety. In this talk, Dr. Brown will present initial evidence for this revised account – specifically, that disrupted uncertainty learning is central to anxiety, is responsible for maladaptive avoidance, and targeted by treatments like exposure therapy.
About the speaker:
Dr. Vanessa Brown is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Emory University. She studies reinforcement learning and decision-making in internalizing disorders. Dr. Brown completed her PhD in clinical psychology at Virginia Tech under the supervision of Pearl Chiu in 2018. She completed her clinical internship at Western Psychiatric Hospital and the University of Pittsburgh, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh with Alex Dombrovski and Rebecca Price.