Research project Social regulation of stress and threat

A substantial body of research indicates that positive social interactions play a critical role in enhancing resilience to stress in aversive situations by suppressing physiological stress responses, but also by altering responses to threat. Despite the potential implications, our understanding of how these systems interact to promote resilience remains largely incomplete.

The project will approach these processes by conceptualizing resilience as the capacity to efficiently extinguish and regulate conditioned threat response after exposure to a stressful event. In doing so, the project will integrate the fields of social regulation of stress and the regulation of learned threat by investigating dyadic social interactions in basic learning paradigms commonly used to study the etiology and treatment of stress and threat-related disorders.

The project will use behavioral experiments, psychophysiological and endocrine measures, and pharmacological manipulations to target the processes underlying social regulation of stress and threat.

This research is fundamental to understanding adaptive socio-emotional behavior and can inform treatment strategies for stress and fear-related disorders and disorders marked by social deficits.