At Horizon, we're delighted to be working with a new Horizon Senior Instructor! We're introducing Professor Dr. Bridget Callaghan who will be joining us this summer as the Clinical Psychology and Emotion Regulation seminar instructor. In this article we'll be covering her extensive academic background and also the engaging topics that this course has to offer.
Dr. Bridget Callaghan
Horizon Academic Senior Instructor
Dr. Bridget Callaghan is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and is the director of the Brain and Body Lab (BABLab), which launched in 2019.
Before starting at UCLA, Bridget was a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University in New York, and completed her doctorate in Psychology and her training as a clinical psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia.
Her work examines interactions between mental and physical health across development. Bridget has experience working with animal models of early adversity, as well as in behavioral, fMRI, and biological research within human populations. Her work at the BaBLab examines how different early life experiences influence interactions between physical and mental health across the lifespan, with the goal of using this research to create better mental and physical health treatments across development, informed by psychological functioning, trauma history, and central and peripheral biology.
Learn more about our Clinical Psychology and Emotion Regulation course
Since our Psychology and Neuroscience offerings in Horizon Labs are among our most popular, and considering that our student body takes special interest in subtopic inquiries in the domain of psychopathology and clinical psychology, last year we introduced the Psychology and Emotion Regulation Horizon Seminar class.
The regulation of emotions is often a fundamental question and biological process underlying many psychological disorders and conditions, and we believe that hosting a course around these topics is especially pertinent today. The pandemic has been a grave source of social isolation and anxiety, and this has accelerated greater global awareness of mental health issues in society and the need to study them. In hosting the class, we aim to create a space where our students could potentially be on the frontlines of ongoing research — research that is highly relevant to the current situation of ordinary people worldwide.
Detailed Course Description
The course will explain and illustrate research methods in psychology using current research on human emotions, emotion regulation, and emotional disorders. Students will become familiar with research methods and experimental designs in these areas. Also, students in the class are free to choose between qualitative research methods or to use statistical and quantitative methods to examine a question in clinical psychology.
We encourage you to browse the pre-approved topics for this seminar:
- Are some emotions more basic than others?
- Do emotions require cognitions?
- How do moods and emotions influence information processing and decision making?
- How are emotions experienced and are they always experienced?
- How can moods and emotions be measured and manipulated?
- Why do people want to regulate their emotions and how do cognitive emotion regulation strategies work?
- How are emotions and cognitions linked to goals and self-regulation?
- How do people differ in their cognitions and emotions and are there “emotion experts”?
- What are the implications of cognitive approaches towards emotions for our understanding and treatment of emotional disorders.
- What are the implications for theories about psychological resilience and well-being?
- What is depression, exactly? Is it one syndrome, or is it a collection of different syndromes that we grouped under the same name?