Michael J. Goldstein Memorial Lecture: Thursday, April 14, 2011

IAN H. GOTLIB, Ph.D.

David Starr Jordan Professor of Psychology, Stanford University
Director, Stanford Mood and Anxiety Disorders Laboratory

Clinically significant depression is among the most prevalent and costly of all psychiatric disorders. Major theories and investigations of depression have typically focused independently on interpersonal, cognitive, biological, or genetic aspects of this disorder. In this talk I will discuss findings from studies in which we have examined psychological and biological functioning in depressed individuals, and will integrate results from these areas of research using the broader constructs of emotion regulation and stress reactivity. In addition, in the context of attempting to understand the role of these constructs in affecting vulnerability to depression, I will also present recent results from an ongoing study of young girls who are at elevated risk for depression by virtue of a family history of the disorder. In this study we are assessing information-processing biases, HPA-axis functioning, patterns of neural activation, brain structure, and genotype. Data from this project are exciting in highlighting areas of dysfunction in which offspring of mothers with recurrent depression already resemble depressed adults, despite not yet having experienced an episode of depression themselves. These data promise to elucidate the nature of the associations among stress reactivity, neuroendocrine functioning, emotion dysregulation, cognitive processing, patterns of neural activation and structural anomalies, and genetics in placing children at elevated risk for depression, and will help to identify critical areas of dysfunction that may serve as targets for prevention programs.