Overview

Anxiety Mood Addiction Research Collaborative (AMARC) believes that solving the mystery of mental illness and improving how we treat mental illness begins with studying the brain. Therefore, the AMARC employs affective, cognitive, and social neuroscience perspectives and uses a multi-level, multi-unit analytic approach that integrates self-report and clinical scales, neuropsychological assessments, behavioral performance, neuropsychopharmacology, and peripheral and central psychophysiology. In addition, our studies involve children and adults and often incorporate clinical trials of pharmacotherapy and psychosocial interventions and longitudinal designs, to interrogate the natural course of illness from risk to illness to recovery to relapse. The Collaborative primarily uses magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI, DTI, sMRI), electroencephalography (EEG) of event-related potentials (ERP), electromyography (EMG) of startle response, and other psychophysiologic readouts (dermal, respiratory, cardiac, endocrine, microbiomic) as assays of brain function as they relate to emotion, affect regulation, motivation and cognition. We focus on anxiety, post-traumatic stress, depression, bipolar, and alcohol and drug use disorders. The Collaborative is intentionally multi-disciplinary and patient-oriented. Ultimately, we seek to understand mental illness more fully, make current treatments better and innovate treatment and prevention strategies that are more targeted and precise, in order to avert or reduce the burden of mental illness.