Cecile D. Ladouceur, PhD

  • Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology
  • Director, Cognitive-Affective Neuroscience & Development (CAN-D) Lab

Phone

412-383-8192

E-mail

ladouceurcd@upmc.edu

Personal Website

Website Link

Campus Address

Loeffler Building, room 316

One-Line Research Description

Neurodevelopment of emotion regulation; Puberty and adolescent brain development; Sex differences in risk for anxiety/mood disorders

I employ a developmental cognitive and affective neuroscience approach to investigate: 1) how neural networks underlying emotion processing and regulation develop in childhood and adolescence, including disentangling processes specific to age versus puberty, 2) how alterations in the development of these systems contribute to the pathophysiology and risk for affective disorders (anxiety, mood disorders), and 3) whether it is possible to harness normative neurodevelopmental processes as a way to identify periods of heightened neural plasticity that can inform novel brain-based and developmentally sensitive interventions in at-risk youth.

Representative Publications

Sequeira SL, Rosen DK, Silk JS, Allen KB, Jones NP, Price RB, Ladouceur CD. “Don’t judge me!”: Links between in vivo attention bias toward a potentially critical judge and fronto-amygdala functional connectivity during rejection in adolescent girls. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. In press.

White SF, Lee Y, Schlund MW, Shirtcliff, EA, Ladouceur CD. Testosterone reactivity is associated with reduced neural response to reward in early adolescence. Behavioural Brain Research. 2020 Jun 1;387: 112593. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2020.112593 PMID: 32194193; PMCID: PMC7214194

Jones NP, Schlund M, Kerestes R, Ladouceur CD. Emotional interference in early adolescence: Positive reinforcement modulates the behavioral and neural effects of negative emotional distracters. Cerebral Cortex. 2019 30(4):2642-2657. PMID: 31812998; PMCID: PMC7175015

Ladouceur CD, Kerestes R, Schlund MW, Shirtcliff EA, Lee Y, Dahl RE. Neural systems underlying reward cue processing in early adolescence: the role of puberty and pubertal hormones. Psychoneuroendocrinology. 2019 102:281-291. PMID: 30639923; PMCID: PMC7085287

Ladouceur CD, Tan P, Sharma V, Bylsma L, Silk J, Siegle G, Forbes E, McMakin DL, Dahl RE, Kendall PC, Mannarino A, Ryan ND. Error-related brain activity in pediatric anxiety disorders remains elevated following individual therapy: a randomized clinical trial. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. 2018 59(11):1152-1161. PMID: 29603219;PMCID: PMC6165715

Ladouceur CD. Neural systems supporting cognitive affective interactions in adolescence: the role of puberty and implications for affective disorders. Frontiers of Integrative Neuroscience. 2012 6(65):1-11. doi:10.3389/fnint.2012.00065. PMID: 22969712

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