CARMA

Community Affective Resilience and Mood and Anxiety

In the mental health field, we are increasingly aware that depression and anxiety exist on a spectrum. This means that a large number of people in our community are experiencing elevated symptoms that disrupt emotional health and daily activities, even if they are not diagnosed with a mood disorder. Those same people may be particularly vulnerable to becoming more severely depressed in response to stressful events. In contrast, other members of our community seem to be especially emotionally resilient, and are rarely anxious or depressed even when stressful events happen in their lives.

As clinical researchers, we want to know: what are the underlying neurocognitive abilities that make someone vulnerable to mood or anxiety traits? What makes someone resilient? And how can we use information about emotional resilience to help our community?

The CARMA study recruits adults ages 18 and older from the Boulder/Denver community for a single research session conducted at our laboratory at the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at CU Boulder. The research session includes a series of computer games that test attention, learning, and emotion regulation, and electronic surveys about mood and anxiety experiences.

All participants are compensated for their time, and participants may choose to withdraw from the study at any time.

Sound interesting? Head to the Participate page to complete our online web screen!