Dr. Anna Weinberg is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Canada Research Chair in Clinical Neuroscience at McGill University. She received her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at Stony Brook University, New York.
Dr. Weinberg’s research focuses on identifying biological pathways that give rise to disordered emotional experience. This involves using multiple methodologies, most often event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the activity of neural systems devoted to processing errors, emotional stimuli, and rewards, and working to establish reliable links between the function of these systems and behavior in healthy populations. With this basic research as a foundation, she seeks to identify multiple abnormalities in these systems that characterize emotional dysfunction in a range of mood and anxiety (i.e., internalizing) disorders. In particular, she is interested in patterns of neural response that respect diagnostic boundaries between anxiety and unipolar mood disorders, and those which reflect more general liabilities that cut across disorders. However, it is not clear whether abnormalities in these systems contribute to the initial occurrence of an illness or emerge following onset. Her recent efforts aim to establish whether these biological correlates of anxiety and depression represent stable vulnerability factors, or whether variation is instead linked to fluctuations in symptom severity.
