Changing developmental patterns is an essential strategy for plants to survive environmental stressors, and the hormone auxin coordinates much of plant development. In the auxin signaling pathway, Aux/IAAs are co-repressors that block expression of auxin target genes. When auxin is present, Aux/IAAs are ubiquinated by an E3 ligase and then degraded via the proteasome. This results in an increase of auxin response gene expression. Past research in the Nemhauser lab found that a dominant mutant in the Aux/IAA known as IAA28 alters the placement of lateral organs around the stem (a process called phyllotaxy). IAA28 loss-of-function mutants show no phenotype, so we hypothesized that another gene or genes could be acting in a redundant manner. IAA28 is closely related to two other Aux/IAAs called IAA18 and IAA26. Using CRISPR/Cas9 technology, I am making triple mutants that lack function of IAA18, IAA26, and IAA28. Once I have these mutants, I will measure phyllotaxy and other developmental phenotypes to look for differences when compared to wild-type plants.

Negative self-concept, or a collection of negative perceptions of and beliefs about the self, may be a key symptom to address when treating traumatized individuals. Previous research has explored explicit reports of symptom differences between those who have suffered prolonged trauma and those who suffered a discrete instance (or instances) of trauma, suggesting that the former may be associated with more severe alterations in self-perception. However, there is not currently any literature addressing the differences in implicit self-concept between these populations. This gap in the literature may be meaningful because implicit attitudes can predict explicit cognitions and behavior, including clinically relevant symptomology. This study examined the relationship between trauma chronicity and implicit self-concept using a version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) designed to measure implicit associations of the self with the concept of “trauma.” Participants were undergraduate students in introductory psychology courses at the University of Washington. They completed an inventory of potential stressful life events, a PTSD symptom questionnaire (PTSD Checklist for DSM-5), and the IAT, along with several demographic questions. Participants who endorsed traumatic life events were also asked to specify if the events lasted for days, weeks, months, or years, in order to classify their trauma exposure as “discrete” or “chronic.” We hypothesized that those with histories of prolonged trauma would show stronger associations of the self with trauma, and that these associations would be positively correlated with explicit reports of PTSD symptoms.This would suggest that the treatment of clients with histories of prolonged trauma benefit from direct targeting of clients’ self-conceptualizations as inherently traumatized.

Fear generalization is the process by which conditioned fear spreads to new, objectively non-threatening stimuli, which, when inappropriately avoided, can lead to psychopathology after trauma. Although fear overgeneralization and maladaptive avoidance are implicated in the development of anxiety and stressor-related disorders, there is little evidence that fear overgeneralization and avoidance are associated with each other. Individuals with “high stress load,” characterized by high neuroticism and prior trauma exposure, may be at higher risk for both fear overgeneralization and experiential and behavioral avoidance. Eighty women, 41 with high stress load and 30 with low stress load, completed questionnaires measuring experiential and behavioral avoidance in their lives and completed a novel, ecologically-valid fear generalization paradigm. In this paradigm, two neutral female faces served as conditioned danger and safety cues, and ambiguous faces, morphed on a continuum between the danger and safety cues, served as generalization stimuli. We predict that participants with high stress load will report higher levels of both experiential and behavioral avoidance. We also predict that high self-reported avoidance will be strongly associated with higher fear overgeneralization in the task. This study will examine the extent to which self-reported avoidance maps onto active avoidance, assessing whether experiential and behavioral avoidance are related to avoidance of non-threatening generalization stimuli. Given that gold standard interventions for anxiety and stressor-related disorders target threat cues, this research highlights the potential importance of helping patients learn how to resist avoiding ambiguous and non-threatening cues.