About

Elizabeth Goldfarb is an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at Yale University. She earned her PhD in 2017 from New York University. Dr. Goldfarb is the director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Affect, Memories and Stress (CAMS) Lab within the Department of Psychiatry. Her research focuses on understanding the neural mechanisms underlying affect, memory, and stress, contributing to the field of cognitive neuroscience. She is involved in advancing knowledge about how affective processes and stress influence memory and brain function, with an emphasis on affective neuroscience and stress-related research.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Neuroscience
• Developmental psychology
• Medicine

Selected publications

• Altered stimulus-response learning and striatal responses in posttraumatic stress disorder

  2026-05-08

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Remembering to drink: Biases in forming alcohol-related episodic memories among risky drinkers

  Alcohol · 2026-04-07

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Childhood environment clusters reveal heterogeneous associations between large-scale brain networks and youth mental health symptoms

  Psychological Medicine · 2026-01-01

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: Youth mental health and brain development are profoundly shaped by highly heterogeneous childhood environments. However, research often operates under the assumption that neural networks linked to psychopathology function in the same way across different individuals, with limited consideration of how brain-behavior associations themselves may vary across environmental contexts. This poses challenges for identifying the precise neural correlates of risk or resilience to psychopathology. METHODS: = 8,078), we examined differences in psychological symptoms and their associations with brain network functional connectivity across three clusters of youth identified by their home, school, and community environments. RESULTS: Child environment groups differed in mental health symptoms, as well as the links between large-scale functional network connectivity and symptoms. Youth exposed to high trauma and familial risk showed the highest symptom levels over time compared to those youth in low-risk or economically disadvantaged environments. Moreover, youth in the high trauma and familial risk group showed stronger functional connectivity between the salience and frontoparietal networks with increased symptoms, whereas youth in the high disadvantage group showed the opposite pattern. Notably, these brain and mental health associations were not observed when examined across the entire sample, and group differences were more pronounced in female and older youth. CONCLUSIONS: The same neural patterns of functional network connectivity can have different implications for mental health depending on the environment. These findings highlight the importance of context-sensitive approaches for developing personalized interventions in supporting youth mental health.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Stress drives the hippocampus to prioritize statistical prediction over episodic encoding

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2025-10-26

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  The hippocampus plays a critical role in encoding individual experiences into episodic memory, while also detecting patterns shared across these experiences that allow us to anticipate future events via statistical learning. Acute stress is known to impact the hippocampus but may have opposite effects on these competing functions. That is, although stress impairs episodic encoding, it may instead enhance statistical learning. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we tested how stress influences the hippocampal pathways and subfields that support episodic encoding and statistical learning while participants performed a task that engaged both processes. Across several analyses, stress biased hippocampal processing in favour of statistical learning, suppressing pattern separation between events in the dentate gyrus and enhancing the representation of statistically predictive features. Furthermore, stress drove the hippocampal monosynaptic pathway to support statistical learning rather than episodic encoding during predictive situations. Together, these data suggest that acute stress elicits targeted, adaptive changes in hippocampal pathways which may facilitate predicting and responding to upcoming events.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 133. Trauma-Predictive Brain Networks Dynamically Respond to Acute Stress

  Biological Psychiatry · 2025-04-09 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Trauma-predictive brain network connectivity adaptively responds to mild acute stress

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2025-07-30 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Past traumatic experiences shape neural responses to future stress, but the mechanisms underlying this dynamic interaction remain unclear. Here, we assessed how trauma-related brain networks respond to current acute stress in real time. Using a machine learning approach, we trained and tested brain functional connectivity networks to predict past trauma exposure in a community sample of adults ( N = 170). We then evaluated the response of these trauma-predictive brain networks to an acute emotional and physiological stressor in a subsample of participants ( N = 92) and to a pharmacological manipulation (hydrocortisone) in an independent crossover study ( N = 27). We found that connectome-based predictive modeling successfully predicted past trauma exposure. The network associated with greater trauma exposure showed high involvement of salience network connections, with model prediction driven by connectivity in the medial frontal cortex, salience network, motor regions, default mode network, and cerebellum. Notably, connectivity in this trauma-predictive network was significantly attenuated following an acute stressor relative to control. A similar pattern was observed in the pharmacology sample, with decreased connectivity under hydrocortisone compared to placebo within this trauma-predictive network. Finally, attenuated trauma-predictive network connectivity after acute stress was associated with lower depressive symptoms in the stress-exposed group, but not control group. These findings suggest that stress may induce blunted connectivity of brain networks related to past traumatic experiences and that the reduced engagement of these trauma-predictive brain networks may facilitate adaptive regulatory response to later stress.

  PublisherDOI

• Dynamic brain mechanisms supporting salient memories under cortisol

  Science Advances · 2025-12-10 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Cortisol is known to promote memory for emotionally arousing experiences, yet the neural networks involved in enhancing these memories are unknown. Here, we combine pharmacological fMRI with an analysis approach to determine the dynamic brain network processes by which cortisol enhances the formation of emotional memories. We introduce dynamic connectome-based predictive modeling (dCPM) to identify high temporal resolution, whole-brain functional connectivity networks, and show that distinct networks can successfully predict trial-level arousal (involving salience network) and subsequent memory (involving visual, frontoparietal, and default mode networks). We find that, under cortisol, brain networks associated with both processing arousal and forming memories have more structural and functional overlap. Neural networks that predict arousal are more consistent and strongly engaged under cortisol, whereas networks that predict memory are more specialized to emotional memoranda. Together, these results reveal a dynamic process by which cortisol shifts whole-brain mechanisms to amplify emotional memories: Cortisol amplifies arousal-predictive networks while tuning memory-predictive networks to prioritize emotionally salient information.

  PublisherDOI

• Positive affect amplifies integration within episodic memories in the laboratory and the real world

  Learning & Memory · 2025-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Emotional events hold a privileged place in our memories, differing in accuracy and structure from memories for neutral experiences. Although much work has focused on the pronounced differences in memory for negative experiences, there is growing evidence that positive events may lead to more holistic, or integrated, memories. However, it is unclear whether these affect-driven changes in memory structure, which have been found in highly controlled laboratory environments, extend to real-world episodic memories. We ran experiments that assessed memory for experiences created in the laboratory (Experiment 1) and, using smartphones, memories for everyday experiences (Experiment 2). We complement these design innovations with a novel analysis approach to model memory accuracy and integration in both settings. Consistent with past findings, emotional events were subjectively remembered more strongly. These studies also revealed that features of more positive events were indeed more integrated within memory, both in the laboratory and the real world. These effects were specific to participants' emotional responses to the events during encoding rather than general emotional states at the time of retrieval, and reflected a general increase in integration between multiple memory features. Together, these results demonstrate robust differences in memory for positive events, introduce a novel measure of memory integration, and highlight the importance of assessing the impact of emotion on memory beyond the laboratory.

  PublisherDOI

• Stimulants as agents of arousal in whole-brain functional connectivity

  Cell · 2025-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Network state dynamics underpin basal craving in a transdiagnostic population

  Molecular Psychiatry · 2024-08-25 · 7 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Neuroimaging multiple memory processes, glucocorticoids and alcoholism risk

  NIH · $701k · 2020–2025

Frequent coauthors

• Elizabeth A. Phelps

  New York University

  41 shared

• Joseph E. Dunsmoor

  The University of Texas at Austin

  26 shared

• Tahj Blow

  Cornell University

  26 shared

• Jennifer C. Harper

  Washington University in St. Louis

  25 shared

• Andrew T. Drysdale

  New York State Psychiatric Institute

  25 shared

• Sonalee Joshi

  University of Pennsylvania

  25 shared

• Sanne van Rooij

  25 shared

• Barbara O. Rothbaum

  Emory University

  25 shared

Education

• PhD, Psychology: Cognition and Perception

  New York University

  2017