Jonathan Stange, PhD
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago
 
Flexibility: Mechanisms, Consequences, and Implications for Mood Disorders
Flexibility – the ability to adapt to changing environmental demands – is an important component of effective self-regulation and psychological well-being. In this talk, Dr. Stange will describe some of the components of flexible thinking, behavior, and affective responding, and how each can be measured. He will demonstrate the consequences of inflexibility, including ineffective affect regulation and vulnerability to depression. Next, he will discuss how his lab has used brain imaging techniques to understand neural network mechanisms that may support flexibility. He will explain the current and future directions for this work, which involves linking laboratory measures of flexibility to indices of affect regulation in daily life. Finally, he will discuss some avenues for translating this work to improve flexibility, so as to promote resilience and reduce vulnerability to problems like depression and suicide.

Faculty host: Lori Zoellner, zoellner @uw.edu.