Matthew Peverill

University of Wisconsin School of Medicine & Public Health

Department of Psychiatry

6001 Research Park Blvd.

Madison, WI 5371

I am a clinical psychological scientist and clinician in training. 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. I am a clinician in training and have received specific training in the use of behavioral parent training to address externalizing disorders in childhood, cognitive behavioral therapy for depression, and evidence based treatments for PTSD including prolonged exposure, cognitive processing therapy, and trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy. In a prior career I was a systems administrator and application developer. In my spare time, I enjoy cooking, reading, and playing with technology.

news

Jun 13, 2022	I will be attending (remotely) SIPS 2022.
Jan 3, 2022	I have finished a four month paternity leave and am beginning a post-doctoral fellowship at Ryan Herringa’s BRAVE lab.
Aug 27, 2021	I have completed my clinical internship and been awarded my PhD from the University of Washington.
Aug 13, 2020	I have begun my pre-doctoral clinical internship in primary care mental health integration at the William S. Middleton Memorial Hospital in Madison, WI
Aug 23, 2019	I will be attending the FLUX Society meeting in New York next week.

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)