Research Interests

Dr. Brian Albanese received his PhD in Clinical Psychology from Florida State University after completing a pre-doctoral internship at the Charleston Consortium in Charleston, SC. Dr. Albanese is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Texas A&M University. His research employs a multi-method approach (e.g., event-related potentials, heart rate vulnerability, skin conductance, ecological momentary assessment) to better understand and treat transdiagnostic risk factors for anxiety-related conditions, with a particular emphasis on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs). Dr. Albanese utilizes event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine various neural mechanisms (e.g., negative reinforcement, threat sensitivity, cognitive control, anxiety sensitivity) in concert with ecological momentary assessments to better understand how neural mechanisms naturalistic, stress-elicited increases in PTSD, STBs, and related psychopathology. His research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH T32), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA F31), and several internal awards. For more information, please visit Dr. Albanese’s lab website. 

Recent Publications

Albanese, B.J., Preston, T.J., Capron, D.W., & McTeague, L. (2021). Diminished responses to external threat as a possible link between chronic/severe PTSD and suicide. Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, 13(7), 783-792. doi: 10.1037/tra0001104

Albanese, B.J., Preston, T.J., Bedford, C., Macatee, R.J., & Schmidt, N.B. (2021). Distress Intolerance prospectively predicts intrusive thoughts following an experimental trauma in a non-clinical sample. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 1-11. doi: 10.1007/s10608-021-10228-2

Albanese, B.J., Capron, D.W., Macatee, R.J., Bauer, B., & Schmidt, N.B. (in press). Thwarted belongingness predicts greater neural reactivity to a novel social exclusion image set: Evidence from the late positive potential. Suicide and Life Threatening Behavior. doi: 10.1111/sltb.12775

Albanese, B.J., & Hajack, G. (2021). Reward processing abnormalities and promising new directions for understanding suicide vulnerability. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 6(1), 8-9. doi: 10.1016/j.bpsc.2020.11.002

Albanese, B.J., Macatee, R.J., Gallyer, A.J., Stanley, I.H., Joiner, T.E., & Schmidt, N.B. (2019). Impaired conflict detection differentiates suicide attempters from ideating non-attempters: Evidence from event-related potentials. Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 4(10), 902-912. doi: 10.1016/j.bpsc.2019.05.015

Karnick, A., Fergerson, A., Caulfield, N., Buerke, M., Albanese, B.J., Schmidt, N.B., & Capron, D.W. (in press). Toward an integrative model of transdiagnostic risk factors and suicide: A network comparison of psychiatric outpatients. Journal of Psychiatric Research. 

Gallyer, A., Dougherty, S., Burani, K., Albanese, B.J., Joiner, T.E., & Hajack, G. (2021). Suicidal thoughts, behaviors, and event-related potentials: A meta-analysis. Psychophysiology, 58(12), e13939.