Professor
Department of Psychology
Hunter College, The City University of New York

In the Emotion Regulation Lab, our mission is to use the concept of emotion regulation to better understand how emotions promote competence or in some cases create vulnerability for psychopathology, particularly anxiety and mood disorders. We integrate the use of neurophysiological (EEG/ERPs), physiological (EMG/HR) and behavioral assessment tools to identify neurocognitive mechanisms underlying affective psychopathology, anxious stress reactivity, and its remediation. Topics of interest include: (1) Biomarkers for emotion regulation and anxiety-related threat biases; (2) neurocognitive processes underlying the remediation of attention dysfunction and stress reactivity in anxiety; (3) emotion-cognition integration; and (4) the use of novel delivery systems, such as mobile applications, for mental health and stress reduction treatments and the neural mechanisms underlying treatment efficacy.

Representative Publications

Dennis, T.A., & O’Toole, L. (in press). Mental health on the go: Effects of a gamified attention bias modification mobile application in trait anxious adults. Clinical Psychological Science.

O’Toole, L. †, Berthod, S. †, DeCicco, J. †, & Dennis, T.A. (2013). The N170 to angry faces predicts anxiety in typically-developing children over a two-year period. Developmental Neuropsychology, 38:5, 352-363.

DeCicco†, J., Solomon†, B., & Dennis, T.A. (2012). Neural correlates of cognitive reappraisal in children: An ERP study. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 2, 70-80.

O’Toole†, L.J., Dennis, T.A. (2012). Attention training and anxiety-related attentional biases: An ERP study. Brain and Cognition, 78, 63-73.

Dennis, T.A., Buss, K.A., Hastings, P.D. (Eds.; 2012). Physiological measures of emotion from a developmental perspective: State of the science. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 77(2).

For more information on Dr. Dennis' lab, please click here.