Candace M. Raio, PhD

My research program focuses on understanding how negative emotional states, such as stress, shape the cognitive, neural and computational mechanisms that support behavioral control and decision-making. Specifically, our work seeks to understand how stress affects the way we flexibly respond to reward and punishment, how stress changes our tendency to engage in self-regulatory behavior like emotion regulation or self-control, and how stress shapes the decisions we make by influencing how value is constructed, particularly under conditions of uncertainty. The overarching motivation that drives my research is to identify and better understand these mechanisms in order to target them to improve our capacity to control behavior and make more advantageous decisions. To achieve this, I use a range of methodological techniques stemming from affective and cognitive neuroscience, including psychophysiology, neuroendocrinology, neuroimaging and computational modeling, in conjunction with experimental paradigms informed by learning models and behavioral economics. Ultimately, through characterizing the effects of stress on emotion regulation and decision-making, I hope to inform our understanding and treatment of stress-related psychiatric disorders, particularly anxiety and mood disorders, and behaviors in which stress serves as key precipitating factor like substance use and disordered eating.

I am a cognitive neuroscientist by training but my research program adopts empirical and analytic approaches stemming from affective science and decision neuroscience ('neuroeconomics') as well. I serve as PI on a NIH-funded R01 grant investigating how stress affects the neural mechanisms underlying decisions to use self-control as well as MPI on a NIH-funded R01 project that examines changes fear-conditioning and extinction circuits after stress reduction interventions in anxiety disorders. My work has been published in academic journals such as Nature, Nature Communication and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and has been funded by the National Institute of Health as well as private foundations such as the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.