Women Scientists in Action

Tara M. Chaplin, Ph.D

Contributed by Samantha Sass

Tara M. Chaplin, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Chaplin’s research focuses on the role of gender and emotion regulation in the development of psychopathology and substance abuse in at-risk children and adolescents. She works in the NIH-funded Specialized Center of Research (SCOR) on Sex and Gender Factors Affecting Women's Health at Yale. Because of her career success, an impressive list of publications and grants, and her commitment to sex/gender research and the health of women and girls, Dr. Chaplin is this month’s featured junior woman scientist.

Since 2006, Dr. Chaplin has worked with Yale University’s Program on Stress, Addiction, and Psychopathology and the Yale Stress Center as the Adolescent Projects Coordinator. In this role, Dr. Chaplin has coordinated the assessments of adolescents for two interdisciplinary projects focused on sex/gender differences in the development of substance abuse in at-risk adolescents. In addition, she has lent her expertise on adolescent development to the formation of new studies and has mentored others in conducting this research.

Dr. Chaplin’s research has focused on sex/gender, stress response, and the development of substance use disorders and psychopathology. She has examined gender differences in emotion and the implications of these for the development and prevention of substance abuse and depression. For example, in one study she found that anxious emotions were more strongly related to future depressive symptoms for adolescent girls than for boys. In another study with adult social drinkers, she found that women reported greater sadness and anxiety in response to a stressor than men and for men (but not women) alcohol craving was associated with emotional responses to the stressor. These findings may help us to understand sex differences in psychological disorders, with women at greater risk for depression/anxiety and men at greater risk for alcohol use disorders.

Concurrent with her work in this program, Dr. Chaplin has also worked as the Principle Investigator on a study entitled, “Gender, Emotional Arousal, and Risk for Adolescent Substance Abuse.” This study uses a bio-psycho-social model to investigate emotional arousal and the development of psychopathology and substance abuse in at-risk adolescents, half of whom were prenatally cocaine exposed. In this study, Dr. Chaplin examines adolescents’ neurobiological, cardiovascular, and self-reported and observed emotional responses to a social stressor, analyzing how these responses differ by gender and are related to the development of substance abuse and depression over time. Major findings of this ongoing study include evidence of greater cortisol levels in prenatally cocaine-exposed youth and heightened anxiety response to the stressor in cocaine-exposed girls. This may have implications for girls’ future development of substance abuse and depression. This possibility is currently being investigated using longitudinal analyses.

Dr. Chaplin is also interested in the role of parent-child relationship quality in the development of emotion regulation and psychopathology in children and adolescents, particularly in at-risk families. She is currently conducting an observational study of adolescents’ bio-psycho-social responses to parent-adolescent conflict interactions and their relation to adolescent substance use and other problem behaviors. She hopes that she can identify specific components of parent-adolescent interactions that can be targeted in substance abuse prevention programs for youth and families.

Dr. Chaplin cites her doctoral and post-doctoral work as foundational in her career of study on the health of women and girls. In her graduate and post-doctoral work, at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively, Dr. Chaplin conducted studies on gender, emotion, and risk for depression. Her graduate work included a study of gender differences in emotional socialization of preschoolers and a study of associations between patterns of emotion and depressive symptoms in adolescence. During her post-doctoral training, she collaborated on a randomized controlled evaluation of a depression prevention program for early adolescents, specifically testing whether the adolescent’s gender influenced the program’s efficiency. During this time Dr. Chaplin also worked with colleagues to develop and pilot a depression prevention program designed specifically for adolescent girls.

Dr. Chaplin’s work in the Yale University SCOR program is a prime example of ORWH’s multi-fold mission to promote and conduct interdisciplinary research focused on major medical problems affecting women and girls and comparing sex/gender contributions to health and disease, while supporting and advancing the careers of women in science. Building on her successful work in this program, Dr. Chaplin has become an Assistant Professor, published numerous peer-reviewed articles, authored several book chapters, and has obtained an NIH Mentored Research Scientist Development Award to support her independent research. She is further praised by her mentor, Dr. Rajita Sinha, “as an exemplary scientist-practitioner, who is conducting cutting edge interdisciplinary translational research on sex-specific bio-behavioral mechanisms that increase risk for mood, anxiety and addictive disorders.”

Dr. Chaplin credits her success as a woman in science in part to the encouragement of her mentors. “I have been fortunate to have had many excellent mentors (many of whom are women) who have encouraged and supported me and have shown me by example how to navigate a successful scientific career as a woman. I have always loved research, but they were the ones who believed in me and told me that I could really make it happen.”

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This page last updated: August 6, 2010