City-Wide Psychiatry Rounds - April 2025
Dr. Mary Seeman Lecture: Reward Processing as a Target for Treatment of Depression and Anxiety
Presenter: Michelle G. Craske, PhD, AO
Register now and join us on Zoom
Michelle G. Craske, PhD, AO is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology, and of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, Kevin Love Fund Centennial Chair, and Director of the Anxiety and Depression Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is also co-director of the UCLA Depression Grand Challenge.
She has published extensively in the area of fear, anxiety and depression, including over 630 peer reviewed journal articles as well as academic books and several self-help books and therapist guides, and is on the Web of Science Most Highly Cited Researcher List. She has been the recipient of extramural funding since 1993 for research projects pertaining to risk factors for anxiety and depression among children and adolescents, neural mediators of emotion regulation and behavioral treatments for anxiety disorders, fear extinction translational models for optimizing exposure therapy, novel behavioral therapies targeting reward sensitivity and anhedonia, and scalable treatment models for underserved populations. As part of the Depression Grand Challenge, she developed the STAND program for screening, tracking and treating anxiety and depression. She is Editor-in-Chief for Behaviour Research and Therapy. Dr. Craske received her BA Hons from the University of Tasmania and her Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia.
Learning Objectives
- Understand the role of low positive affect and deficits in reward processing as risk factors and correlates of depression and anxiety
- Understand the evidence for the efficacy of a novel behavioural treatment that directly targets deficits in reward processing for low positive affect, depression and anxiety
- Understand the role of low positive affect and weak reward processing in the context of extinction and exposure therapy