Selected Publications
& Research Articles
Where Do Fears Come From? How Can New Insights Enhance Treatment?
Dual-campus study leverages math in improving commonly used exposure therapy
New fear and exposure therapy research provides fundamental “Newtonian physics” to behavioral health treatment – leading the way for better, personalized treatments.
Why Some Swifties Report ‘Concert Amnesia’ After Attending the Eras Tour
Some Taylor Swift fans have reported a blank space in place of vivid concert memories after attending Taylor Swift’s epic three-hour show, but a CU School of Medicine researcher explains it’s a normal function of the brain.
Joel Stoddard, Elizabeth Reynolds, Ruth Paris, Simone P. Haller, Sara B. Johnson, Jodi Zik, Eliza Elliotte, Mihoko Maru, Allison L. Jaffe, Ajitha Mallidi, Ashley R. Smith, Raquel G. Hernandez, Heather E. Volk, Melissa A. Brotman, Joan Kaufman. (2023). The Coronavirus Impact Scale: Construction, Validation, and Comparisons in Diverse Clinical Samples
This report is of the construction and initial psychometric properties of the Coronavirus Impact Scale in multiple large and diverse samples of families with children and adolescents. The scale was established to capture the impact of the coronavirus pandemic during its first wave. Differences in impact between samples and internal structure within samples were assessed.
URL: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2949732923000066
Penner, A. E., & Stoddard, J. (2018). Clinical Affective Neuroscience. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 57(12), 906–908.
Affective neuroscience is a promising young field in neuroscience for understanding the basis of many types of psychopathology. It describes the scientific investigation of the neural basis of affect, emotion, and feelings. These phenomena arise from mental processes that are not always directly observable, which complicates discovering their neural basis. Still, as it has done for other inferred processes, such as memory and language, neuroscience should transform our emotion-based patient formulations and lead to novel, targeted therapeutics for emotional issues. In this Translations, we aim to provide a brief introduction to affective neuroscience for clinicians, beginning with defining key terms and then reviewing clinical applications.
URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2018.07.877
Stoddard, J., Sharif-Askary, B., Harkins, E. A., Frank, H. R., Brotman, M. A., Penton-Voak, I. S., ... & Leibenluft, E. (2016). An open pilot study of training hostile interpretation bias to treat disruptive mood dysregulation disorder. Journal of child and adolescent psychopharmacology, 26(1), 49-57.
Relative to healthy youth, DMDD youth manifested a shifted balance point, expressed as a tendency to classify ambiguous faces as angry rather than happy. In both healthy and DMDD youth, active training is associated with a shift in balance point toward more happy judgments. In DMDD, evidence suggests that active training may be associated with decreased irritability and changes in activation in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex. These results set the stage for further research on computer-based treatment targeting interpretation bias of angry faces in DMDD. Such treatment may decrease irritability and alter neural responses to subtle expressions of happiness and anger.
Wan-Ling Tseng, Christen M Deveney, Joel Stoddard, Katharina Kircanski, Anna E Frackman, Jennifer Y Yi, Derek Hsu, Elizabeth Moroney, Laura Machlin, Laura Donahue, Alexandra Roule, Gretchen Perhamus, Richard C Reynolds, Roxann Roberson-Nay, John M Hettema, Kenneth E Towbin, Argyris Stringaris, Daniel S Pine, Melissa A Brotman, Ellen Leibenluft (2019). Brain Mechanisms of Attention Orienting Following Frustration: Associations With Irritability and Age in Youths
Childhood irritability is a common, impairing problem with changing age-related manifestations that predict long-term adverse outcomes. However, more investigation of overall and age-specific neural correlates is needed. Because youths with irritability exhibit exaggerated responses to frustrating stimuli, the authors used a frustration functional MRI (fMRI) paradigm to examine associations between irritability and neural activation and tested the moderating effect of age.
URL: https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.ajp.2018.18040491
Haller, S. P., Kircanski, K., Stoddard, J., White, L. K., Chen, G., Sharif-Askary, B., ... & Brotman, M. A. (2018). Reliability of neural activation and connectivity during implicit face emotion processing in youth. Developmental cognitive neuroscience, 31, 67-73.
Face emotion imaging paradigms are widely used in both healthy and psychiatric populations. Here, in children and adolescents, we evaluate the test-retest reliability of blood oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) activation and task-based functional connectivity on a widely used implicit face emotion processing task (i.e., gender labeling). For each face emotion vs. baseline, good reliability of activation was demonstrated across key emotion processing regions including middle, medial, and inferior frontal gyri. However, contrasts between face emotions yielded variable results. Contrasts of angry to neutral or happy faces exhibited good reliability of amygdala connectivity to prefrontal regions. Contrasts of fearful to happy faces exhibited good reliability of activation in the anterior cingulate.
URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878929317302001
Maoz, K., Eldar, S., Stoddard, J., Pine, D. S., Leibenluft, E., & Bar-Haim, Y. (2016). Angry-happy interpretations of ambiguous faces in social anxiety disorder. Psychiatry research, 241, 122-127.
Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is characterized by a tendency to interpret ambiguous social cues as negative. Here we tested whether interpretation of ambiguous faces differs between participants with SAD and non-anxious controls. Participants with SAD judged a higher proportion of the faces as angry compared to non-anxious participants, and were slower to judge faces as angry compared to happy, while no such reaction time bias manifested in the control group. Finally, happy judgments were slower in the SAD group compared to the control group, while angry judgments were faster in the SAD group compared to the control group. These findings provide evidence for a negative bias in resolving emotional ambiguity in facial expressions among individuals with SAD.