Sensitive Periods of Frontolimbic Development: Implications for Optimizing Interventions for Anxious Youth
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This talk will highlight dynamic changes that occur in frontolimbic circuitry throughout childhood and adolescence and how stress influences this development.
Understanding how the brain develops during childhood and adolescence, and how brain maturation is affected by stress, is critical to identifying risk for mental health disorders and optimizing interventions. Frontolimbic circuitry that supports emotion regulation undergoes dynamic changes across childhood and adolescence. This circuitry is sensitive to early-life stress and has been implicated in the emergence of anxiety disorders during development. However, much remains unknown about the construction of human frontolimbic circuitry and the mechanisms through which early-life stress contributes to risk for mental health disorders. This talk will highlight dynamic changes that occur in frontolimbic circuitry throughout childhood and adolescence and how stress influences this development. These findings will be discussed in terms of their implications for identifying sensitive periods of neurodevelopment, as well as future directions that aim to translate research in developmental affective neuroscience into more precise clinical interventions for anxiety and stress-related disorders.
About the Speaker:
Dylan G. Gee, Ph.D.
Yale University
Dr. Gee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Yale University. She received her B.A. in Psychological and Brain Studies from Dartmouth College in 2007 and her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from UCLA in 2015. Prior to joining the faculty at Yale, Dr. Gee completed her clinical internship at Weill Cornell Medical College and a research fellowship at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology. Her research focuses on developmental psychopathology, with primary goals to delineate typical and atypical brain development, elucidate how early environments influence sensitive periods in neurodevelopment and risk for anxiety and stress-related disorders, and translate knowledge of brain development to optimize clinical interventions for children and adolescents.
For more information, please contact:
Dominic Fareri
e – dfareri@adelphi.edu