I am a licensed clinical psychologist and a scientist working in the area of early life adversity and trauma. Clinically, I am an independent practitioner providing psychotherapy for children, adolescents, and adults. My specialties include trauma-focused therapies and the treatment of disruptive behavior disorders in childhood. Academically, I am a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Wisconsin in the department of Psychiatry. In a prior career I was a systems administrator and application developer. In my spare time, I enjoy biking, cooking, reading, playing with technology, and spending time with my partner and two children.

Practice

As a clinician, my goal is to give my clients the emotional space and psychological tools needed to reach their goals with wisdom and skill. My therapeutic approach is grounded in well-tested, proven principles of clinical change, applied flexibly within a warm, validating, and genuine relationship. I have seen my clients reach their goals in as little as a few sessions and up to several years of treatment – I strive to set a pace to our work that honors both our relationship and the urgency of your needs.

I have advanced training in working with individuals affected by trauma and PTSD, as well as family-based treatments for disruptive behavior in childhood. I am a clinical scientist and have worked extensively to advance understanding of early life adversity and trauma. You can read more about my research on my personal website.

I am experienced in working with clients of all ages. I strongly believe that providing support for parents is one of the best ways we can support children. Especially for young children, I often work primarily or solely with parents. This approach has been shown to be just as or more effective than individual treatment in many cases.

My practice is located at Family Therapy Center of Madison. If you are interested in working with me, please call (608) 276-9191).

Research

I am passionate about research with the potential to realize improved clinical outcomes in vulnerable, under-served, and under-studied children and families. To that end, my research has employed neuropsychological, psychological, and epidemiological tools to explore multiple mechanisms of mental health risk in children exposed to adverse experiences including child maltreatment, neglect, and poverty. Specifically, my work has investigated psychosocial threat as a dimension of adversity with unique effects on the structure and function of areas of the brain thought to be involved in emotional regulation and reactivity. I am extremely interested in pathways linking socioeconomic status to mental health outcomes, and recently published a first ever meta-analysis of the association of socioeconomic status with childhood psychopathology in population representative studies. In my dissertation study, I used multimodal measurement of socioeconomic status to research the effects of poverty on psychopathology risk factors including stress, emotion regulation, and social cognition.

I completed my graduate education at the University of Washington under the supervision of Katie McLaughlin. I am currently a post-doctoral research associate at Ryan Herringa’s BRAVE lab.

My methodological toolbox includes: structural MRI analysis in FreeSurfer, functional connectivity analysis in FSL, and multi-level modeling.

selected publications

Socioeconomic status and child psychopathology in the United States: A meta-analysis of population-based studies

Peverill, Matthew, Dirks, Melanie A., Narvaja, Tomás, Herts, Kate L., Comer, Jonathan S., and McLaughlin, Katie A.

Clinical Psychology Review 2021

Abs

Children raised in families with low socioeconomic status (SES) are more likely to exhibit symptoms of psychopathology. However, the strength of this association, the specific indices of SES most strongly associated with childhood psychopathology, and factors moderating the association are strikingly inconsistent across studies. We conducted a meta-analysis of 120 estimates of the association between family SES and child psychopathology in 13 population-representative cohorts of children studied in the US since 1980. Among 26,715 participants aged 3–19 years, we observed small to moderate associations of low family income (g = 0.19), low Hollingshead index (g = 0.21), low subjective SES (g = 0.24), low parental education (g = 0.25), poverty status (g = 0.25), and receipt of public assistance (g = 0.32) with higher levels of childhood psychopathology. Moderator testing revealed that receipt of public assistance showed an especially strong association with psychopathology and that SES was more strongly related to externalizing than internalizing psychopathology. Dispersion in our final, random effects, model suggested that the relation between SES and child psychopathology is likely to vary in different populations of children and in different communities. These findings highlight the need for additional research on the mechanisms of SES-related psychopathology risk in children in order to identify targets for potential intervention.
Child maltreatment and neural systems underlying emotion regulation

McLaughlin, Katie A., Peverill, Matthew, Gold, Andrea L., Alves, Sonia, and Sheridan, Margaret A.

Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Sep 2015

Abs

OBJECTIVE: The strong associations between child maltreatment and psychopathology have generated interest in identifying neurodevelopmental processes that are disrupted following maltreatment. Previous research has focused largely on neural response to negative facial emotion. We determined whether child maltreatment was associated with neural responses during passive viewing of negative and positive emotional stimuli and effortful attempts to regulate emotional responses. METHOD: A total of 42 adolescents aged 13 to 19 years, half with exposure to physical and/or sexual abuse, participated. Blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) response was measured during passive viewing of negative and positive emotional stimuli and attempts to modulate emotional responses using cognitive reappraisal. RESULTS: Maltreated adolescents exhibited heightened response in multiple nodes of the salience network, including amygdala, putamen, and anterior insula, to negative relative to neutral stimuli. During attempts to decrease responses to negative stimuli relative to passive viewing, maltreatment was associated with greater recruitment of superior frontal gyrus, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and frontal pole; adolescents with and without maltreatment down-regulated amygdala response to a similar degree. No associations were observed between maltreatment and neural response to positive emotional stimuli during passive viewing or effortful regulation. CONCLUSION: Child maltreatment heightens the salience of negative emotional stimuli. Although maltreated adolescents modulate amygdala responses to negative cues to a degree similar to that of non-maltreated youths, they use regions involved in effortful control to a greater degree to do so, potentially because greater effort is required to modulate heightened amygdala responses. These findings are promising, given the centrality of cognitive restructuring in trauma-focused treatments for children.
Dynamic associations between stressful life events and adolescent internalizing psychopathology in a multiwave longitudinal study

Jenness, Jessica L., Peverill, Matthew, King, Kevin M., Hankin, Benjamin L., and McLaughlin, Katie A.

Journal of Abnormal Psychology Aug 2019

Abs

Associations between stressful life events (SLEs) and internalizing psychopathology are complex and bidirectional, involving interactions among stressors across development to predict psychopathology (i.e., stress sensitization) and psychopathology predicting greater exposure to SLEs (i.e., stress generation). Although stress sensitization and generation theoretical models inherently focus on within-person effects, most previous research has compared average levels of stress and psychopathology across individuals in a sample (i.e., between-person effects). The present study addressed this gap by investigating stress sensitization and stress generation effects in a multiwave, prospective study of SLEs and adolescent depression and anxiety symptoms. Depression, anxiety, and SLE exposure were assessed every 3 months for 2 years (8 waves of data) in a sample of adolescents (n = 382, aged 11 to 15 at baseline). Multilevel modeling revealed within-person stress sensitization effects such that the association between within-person increases in SLEs and depression, but not anxiety, symptoms were stronger among adolescents who experienced higher average levels of SLEs across 2 years. We also observed within-person stress generation effects, such that adolescents reported a greater number of dependent-interpersonal SLEs during time periods after experiencing higher levels of depression at the previous wave than was typical for them. Although no within-person stress generation effects emerged for anxiety, higher overall levels of anxiety predicted greater exposure to dependent-interpersonal SLEs. Our findings extend prior work by demonstrating stress sensitization in predicting depression following normative forms of SLEs and stress generation effects for both depression and anxiety using a multilevel modeling approach. Clinical implications include an individualized approach to interventions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)
Childhood trauma and brain structure in children and adolescents

Peverill, Matthew, Rosen, Maya L., Lurie, Lucy A., Sambrook, Kelly A., Sheridan, Margaret A., and McLaughlin, Katie A.

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Aug 2023

Abs

The dimensional model of adversity proposes that experiences of threat and deprivation have distinct neurodevelopmental consequences. We examined these dimensions, separately and jointly, with brain structure in a sample of 149 youth aged 8–17—half recruited based on exposure to threat-related experiences. We predicted that greater threat would be uniquely associated with reduced cortical thickness and surface area in brain regions associated with salience processing including ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and insula, and that deprivation experiences would be uniquely associated with reductions in cortical thickness and surface area in frontoparietal areas associated with cognitive control. As predicted, greater threat was associated with thinner cortex in a network including areas involved in salience processing (anterior insula, vmPFC), and smaller amygdala volume (particularly in younger participants), after controlling for deprivation. Contrary to our hypotheses, threat was also associated with thinning in the frontoparietal control network. However, these associations were reduced following control for deprivation. No associations were found between deprivation and brain structure. This examination of deprivation and threat concurrently in the same sample provided further evidence that threat-related experiences influence the structure of the developing brain independent of deprivation.