The teenage years are a turbulent time, packed with an emotional intensity that is rarely matched in adulthood. For Leah Somerville, PhD, that's what makes adolescence a particularly fascinating period of development to explore.
Somerville, the winner of the $25,000 F.J. McGuigan Early Career Investigator Prize for 2014–15, is an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University and the head of the Affective Neuroscience and Development Laboratory there. She studies how and why emotional responses to the same stimuli vary from person to person and over the lifespan, and the neural systems that underlie emotional response.
She began her career in graduate school studying emotion in adults, but soon switched to studying mainly teens. "I quickly realized that the teen years were where the action was," she says. "Not only because this is when people tend to experience really intense emotion, but also because the teen years are when the risk of psychopathology becomes much more common."
Somerville, who earned her PhD in psychology from Dartmouth College in 2008, uses behavioral and psychophysiological measures as well as neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI to explore how adolescent brain development and emotional experience are related. Her work has suggested that the gap between when emotion-generating brain circuitry reaches maturity in early adolescence and when emotion-regulating circuitry reaches maturity in adulthood may underlie teens' highly charged emotional life. It may also help explain why many mood and anxiety disorders first appear in adolescence.
Somerville says that the McGuigan Prize will allow her to explore new technologies and methods for studying teens' emotional responses. She plans to begin a study in which teens will wear Fitbit-like tracking devices that record sleep and physiological responses such as heart rate and other measures. She and her research team will correlate that information with self-reported measures of the teens' emotional states over the course of the study.
"We'll be able to characterize their experiences in much richer detail, using both in-the-lab and out-of-the-lab measures," she says.
Somerville says she is gratified by the recognition of her work that the McGuigan Prize represents.
The prize, which supports research that aims to advance a materialistic understanding of the human mind, is given to an early career investigator to recognize research conducted to date, as well as research planned for the next five years.
"I'm really excited to receive this recognition. It's a real honor not just for me, but for my whole lab," she says.
Applications for the 2016–17 prize are due March 1, 2016.
