Neural Mechanisms Underlying Attention Deficits in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder by Stefanie Russman Block A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Psychology) in The University of Michigan 2018 Doctoral Committee: Professor Israel Liberzon, Chair Assistant Professor Luke W. Hyde Research Assistant Professor Anthony P. King Associate Professor Sekhar C. Sripada Associate Professor Daniel H. Weissma Stefanie Russman Block
[email protected] ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7528-0882 © Stefanie Russman Block 2017 DEDICATION To all those suffering from mental illness, and to all those with an insatiable curiosity for knowledge. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply grateful to everyone on my dissertation committee: Dr. Israel Liberzon for his support and guidance throughout the years, Dr. Anthony King for allowing me to test my hypotheses in his data set, Dr. Daniel Weissman for his input on task design and teaching mentorship, Dr. Chandra Sripada for help with fMRI methodology and use of ADHD measures, and Dr. Luke Hyde for his positive role in shaping the Clinical Science program. I am grateful to everyone in the Psychiatric Affective Neuroimaging Lab and the Trauma, Stress and Anxiety Research Program. Specifically, I would like to thank my research assistants – Michaela Milillo, Lisa Blake, Rachel John, Nicole Corso and Damaris Pop – for their help with subject recruitment, data collection and data analyses, Nita Patel for conducting the MRI scans, Dr. Liz Duval for clinical supervision, IRB assistance, and moral support, Dr. Rebecca Sripada for her contribution to the ideas in Experiment 1 and showing me the ropes of neuroimaging analyses, Yana Lokshina for her help with data analyses, and Dr.