Gabrielle Liverant, PhD

Specialty Areas

Depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, emotional reactivity and regulation dysfunction, reward learning, punishment learning

My research centers on the identification of shared etiological mechanisms that underlie mood, anxiety, and trauma and stressor related disorders, and the translation of this knowledge into more effective psychotherapeutic and pharmacological interventions. My recent work has focused on enhancing understanding of anhedonia, associated reward system impairments, and emotional reactivity and regulation dysfunction across psychiatric disorders. In particular, I have investigated the presence and nature of these impairments across three conditions that are marked by deficits in reward responding/anhedonia (depression, posttraumatic stress disorder/PTSD, and schizophrenia). This includes research examining alterations in both the acquisition and extinction of reward learning, the relationship of these learning impairments to the clinical experience of anhedonia, and associations between reward learning and co-occurring nicotine dependence in these disorders. The transdiagnostic, phenotypic focus of my research is designed to promote the dissemination and application of new interventions across disorders and populations (e.g., depression, PTSD).

Publications

• Liverant, G. I., Sloan, D. M., Pizzagalli, D., Harte, C. B., Kamholz, B. W., Rosebrock, L., Cohen, A. C., Fava, M., & Kaplan, G. B. (2014). Associations among smoking, anhedonia, and reward learning in depression. Behavior Therapy.
• Harte, C. B., Liverant, G. I., Sloan, D. M., Kamholz, B. W., Rosebrock, L. E., Fava, M., & Kaplan, G. B. (2013). Association between smoking and heart rate variability among individuals with depression. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 46, 73-80.
• Liverant, G. I., Suvak, M. K., Pineles, S. L., & Resick, P. A. (2012). Changes in posttraumatic stress disorder and depressive symptoms during Cognitive Processing Therapy: Evidence for concurrent change. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 80, 957-967.
• Liverant, G. I., Kamholz, B. W., Sloan, D. M., & Brown, T. A. (2010). Rumination in clinical depression: A type of emotional suppression? Cognitive Therapy and Research, 3, 253-265.
• Liverant, G. I., Brown, T. A., Barlow, D. H., & Roemer, L. (2008) Emotion regulation in unipolar depression: The effects of acceptance and suppression of subjective emotional experience on the intensity and duration of sadness and negative affect. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 46, 1202-1209.