Angela Fang, PhD
Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School
 
Integrating Neuroscience Toward Delivering Precision Treatment and Developing Novel Therapeutics
Adaptive processing of social and emotional information reflects a balance of brain and behavior interactions with the environment. Disruptions in this balance can lead to interpersonal dysfunction and a wide range of psychopathology. In this talk, Dr. Fang argues that integrating well-established tools in neuroscience with models of psychological illness can inform our understanding of the social and emotional information processing mechanisms that may enable or impede treatment outcomes. She will present data from one area of research that identifies the brain correlates of maladaptive self-focused attention (a bias in social cognition involving preferential attention toward internal thoughts, feelings, and beliefs), which may represent sensitive markers of treatment outcome. She will also describe work from another line of research showing that intranasal oxytocin holds promise as an endogenous neuromodulator of biases in social cognition when individual differences in psychological illness are taken into account. She will conclude by briefly sharing directions for future work to advance precision psychotherapy and novel therapeutics. 

This free lecture is  part of the candidate review for an assistant professor position in Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychology.