Future Meetings
2026 Annual Meeting
The fruits of the “affect revolution” in conceptualizing, understanding, and intervening in psychopathology
The “affect revolution” during the past several decades had focused substantial research efforts on the roles of the experience and regulation of emotion and mood in psychological adjustment and psychopathology. The experience and regulation of affect has now been studied across the entire life-span and in lab and daily-life settings; various biomarkers have been examined; emotion regulation that goes awry has been conceptualized as a transdiagnostic process; dysregulated affect also has been proposed as a risk factor for various psychopathologies and psychiatric disorders; and the vast and continuously expanding literature on emotion-focused interventions speaks to the timeliness of these topics. The 2026 APPA meeting will address the question as to what has been learned as the consequence of the “affect revolution.” What is the current status of affect in our conceptualization of human behavior? Has the research across the past several decades yielded novel findings about the relationship of affect experience and psychopathology? Have the findings advanced our understanding of the course and outcomes of major psychiatric disorders like depression, schizophrenia, or substance-use related conditions? And what is the future of affect-focused research?
Maria Kovacs, PhD
University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry
2027 Annual Meeting
For this year’s theme, we will draw inspiration from the great psychologist William James whose
work inspired the creation of APPA and who wrote:
The backache, the long hours, the danger, are patiently endured-for what? To gain a quid
of tobacco, a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, a meal, and a bed, and to begin again the next
day and shirk as much as one can. This really is why we raise no monument to the
laborers in the subway, even though they be out conscripts, and even though after a
fashion our city is indeed based upon their patient hearts and enduring backs and
shoulders. And this is why we do raise monuments to our soldiers, whose outward
conditions were even brutaller still. The soldiers are supposed to have followed an ideal,
and the laborers are supposed to have followed none.
The topic of work and mental health has not been covered in the APPA meetings of the recent
past.
The 2027 conference theme will be “Family/Work Balance and Mental Health in the
21st
Century.” We will cover important advances in patient-centered research and in population
health studies. There will be a specific focus on preventive interventions when we must balance
family care for those who depend upon us to be of help, from the youngest young to the oldest
old
Causal Methods and Inference in Psychopathology Research. Making Etiological Research Relevant for Clinical Applications
Etiological research of psychopathology is challenging given the breadth and complexity of risk
factors and outcomes. For a long time, research on the causes of psychopathology was largely
limited to randomized trials and association studies, but this has changed. Researcher now
utilizes many novel or adapted approaches developed by different disciplines: causal inference
methods (g-family) and target trial emulation, Mendelian Randomization and methods to
control for genetic confounding, discordant twin and sibling studies, instrumental variable and
fixed effects regression analyses, advanced structural equation modelling and alternative cross-
lagged panel models. However, the application of these methods in psychopathology research
remains challenging and is hampered by the lack of appropriate data and knowledge of
methods including their assumptions. I propose to organize an APPA conference that would
bring together leading scholars on a diverse set of methodological advances in causal methods
applied in psychopathology research from different backgrounds such as genetic epidemiology,
econometrics, family studies, and psychology. Importantly, this would be a conference that
bridges different disciplines, not only as speakers but as attendees. Such a conference can help
APPA branch out to adjacent disciplines typically not included such as genetic epidemiologists
or neuroscientists studying psychopathology and engage them in the discussion of different
approaches to causal inference. The goal is not only to present state of the art causal methods
and discuss their applications for psychopathology research, but the focus will also be on the
limitations of these methods, assumptions, caveats, and the consequences for future data
collections. To make etiological research more relevant for public health and clinical
applications, time is devoted to discuss the questions to be addressed to make etiological
research most relevant.
