Leah Mayo
Research Fellow
My research focuses on the neurobiology of stress and emotion processing in healthy and clinical populations.
Presentation
Many psychiatric conditions are hallmarked by dysregulated stress reactivity and emotional responding. My research aims to better understand stress and emotion processing in order to develop novel psychiatric therapies.
Our work combines behavioral, psychophysiological, and neuroimaging methods to gain better insight into how we perceive and react to stressful situations and emotional stimuli. I am particularly interested in the role of the endocannabinoid system, a neuromodulatory system involved in both stress reactivity and emotion processing. In healthy populations, we are exploring how external factors (e.g. stress, drugs of abuse) influence the endocannabinoid system. In clinical populations, we are interested in how the endocannabinoid system becomes dysregulated and contributes to impairments in stress and emotional reactivity. Our overall goal is to determine if the endocannabinoid system can serve as a novel target in the treatment of psychiatric disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
