Research Projects
After graduating with a B.S. in Cognitive & Brain Sciences from Tufts University, I joined the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab led by Professor Jamil Zaki to study the neural foundations of empathy. Under the mentorship of Associate Professor Jamie Hanson at the University of Pittsburgh, my graduate research in clinical and developmental psychology investigated how early childhood experiences influence the development of externalizing behaviors (e.g., conduct problems, irritability) and socioemotional functioning (e.g., empathy, emotion dysregulation). I am continuing this work at the University of Pennsylvania as a postdoctoral fellow under the mentorship of Assistant Professor Emily Becker-Haimes, where I am also incorporating implementation science to translate scientific findings into interventions that benefit our communities.
Read about my work on early life adversity and...
Read about my work on empathy and...
Early Life Adversity and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)
While early life adversity (ELA) is a well-established risk factor for BPD, research has yielded inconsistent findings about which types of traumatic experiences are most strongly associated with BPD symptoms. In this preregistered study currently under review, I and my co-authors from McLean Hosptital applied a dimensional framework of ELA to examine whether experiences characterized by threat (i.e., fear of harm) versus deprivation (i.e., the absence of expected emotional and physical support) were differentially associated with BPD symptoms among 176 adolescents and emerging adults receiving intensive Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) in a partial hospitalization program. We examined associations with overall BPD symptom severity, specific symptom domains, and suicidality, at treatment entry and after 20 days of treatment.
Experiences characterized by threat, but not deprivation, were associated with greater overall BPD symptom severity at treatment entry, including interpersonal, cognitive, and affective symptoms. Threat was also associated with greater clinician-assessed suicidality. . Additional analyses identified emotional threat as a particularly consistent predictor of BPD symptoms across multiple domains. Neither threat nor deprivation predicted BPD symptom severity after 20 days of DBT when accounting for initial symptom levels.
Shared characteristics of traumatic experiences - in particular, fear, hostility, and emotional invalidation - may be important for understanding the development and presentation of borderline pathology beyond traditional categories of ELA. The findings also offer an encouraging clinical message: although childhood threat was associated with greater symptom severity at treatment entry, trauma history did not predict short-term symptom outcomes during intensive DBT.
Dimensions of Early Life Adversity and Prosocial Behavior
How does early life adversity (ELA) shape children's capacity to care for and help others? Although we know that ELA is associated with a range of mental health difficulties, less is known about its influence on positive aspects of socioemotional development, including prosocial behavior. In this study, I examined longitudinal data from 11,868 youth in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study to investigate how experiences of ELA relate to prosocial behavior from ages 9 to 13. Along with my co-authors, I examined both the cumulative burden of ELA and two distinct dimensions of adversity: threat, or experiences involving potential harm, and deprivation, or experiences involving reduced access to social, emotional, and cognitive resources.
Our findings revealed distinct patterns of association depending on the type of ELA experienced and whether youth or caregivers reported on prosocial behavior. Greater cumulative ELA was associated with lower initial levels of prosocial behavior across both informants. However, when examining specific dimensions of adversity, youth reporting greater exposure to threat showed slightly higher initial prosocial behavior followed by greater declines over time, whereas youth experiencing greater deprivation began with lower prosocial behavior but showed increases across early adolescence. These developmental patterns were not evident in caregiver reports, highlighting the importance of incorporating young people's own perspectives when studying social development.
This work, currently under review, suggests that childhood adversity does not have a uniform relationship with prosocial behavior. Understanding how different adverse experiences shape positive socioemotional development may help clarify pathways linking early environments to later interpersonal functioning.
Early Life Adversity & Empathy
Research has established early life adversity (ELA) as a powerful antecedent to an array of socioemotional problems, but it is less clear how ELA impacts empathy specifically. Empathy is a fundamental skill linked to social development and resilience and underpins critical processes such as successful interpersonal interactions, bond formation, and prosocial behavior.
I have investigated associations between early life adversity and empathy across several studies. In one study, I examined performance on a gold-standard naturalistic measure of empathy as a moderator between ELA and externalizing behavior in an online sample of 165 adults. I found that individuals with poor empathy skills who experienced certain aspects of ELA were more likely to report externalizing behavior as adults. Average and above-average empathy skills, however, were protective against this ELA-externalizing link (Kahhale et al., 2024, Affective Science). PDF here!
Paradigm used to collect observer ratings. Observers used a visual analog scale from “Very Negative” to “Very Positive” and dragged the slider as the video was playing to rate the target’s valence. Videos captured targets’ faces and shoulders against a clean, black backdrop. Figure inspired by Ong et al., 2019. Cartoon derived from Bing.com Image Generator.
I recently authored a scoping review of 43 empirical articles on ELA and empathy to identify gaps for continued exploration (Kahhale et al., 2025, Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, PDF here!). My review highlighted that while some evidence has linked ELA to compromised empathy, other research has found increased empathy following ELA. From these muddled findings, I derived actionable recommendations for future research on childhood trauma and socioemotional functioning. These included the need to a) broaden the operationalization of ELA in research, b) explore nuanced subtypes and naturalistic measures of empathy, and c) focus on adolescence as a sensitive developmental period.
Aggression & Empathy
I've long since been interested in the relationship between aggression and empathy and explored these constructs in a sample of adolescents (N = 103) at high risk for emotion dysregulation. I considered youth-report empathy on a newly-validated self-report empathy measure (i.e., the CASES) and multi-informant reports on aggression (i.e., youth, parent, and teacher) across two timepoints.
I found that certain empathy subtypes -- namely, somatic empathy -- was associated with decreased proactive and reactive aggression in teens (Kahhale et al., 2024, PDF here!). This underscored the role of empathy as a resilience factor.
I am now exploring the shared and distinct neural correlates of empathy and aggression in this same sample (pre-registration: https://osf.io/by9rq)
The Impact of Racism-Based Traumatic Stress on Youth
Integrating clinical observations with research, co-authors and I published recommendations for researchers and clinicians on addressing racism-based stress among youth of color (Kahhale et al., 2024, JAACAP, PDF here). Racism-related experiences are a ubiquitous reality for youth of color, with research indicating that some youth may encounter as many as five incidents of racial discrimination daily. These experiences reinforce health disparities across the lifespan and have been linked to psychological symptoms including suicidal thoughts, depression, and anxiety. Further, racism exposure can trigger biological and psychological stress responses such as avoidance and hypervigilance. Despite concerns regarding the impact of racism-based traumatic stress (RBTS) on development, RBTS has received limited recognition in clinical practice. We provide concrete recommendations for formally acknowledging the impact of RBTS on these populations, as failing to identify and address RBTS symptoms may compromise the quality of mental health services received by youth of color.
Empathy can influence our understanding of others and bias our decision making. While at the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, I investigated how taking the perspective of a victim or a perpetrator of a crime might impact the extent to which we punish and dehumanize the perpetrator.
Empathy & Outcomes
in a Legal Context
We conducted 1) an analysis of restricted-access archival data on over 12 million national incarceration records and 2) an experiment and pre-registered replication study.
We found that hearing the perpetrator’s perspective led to a shorter recommended sentence, and more importantly, less dehumanization. These results highlight the impactful nature of someone’s story in influencing perceptions of their behavior (Kahhale et al., 2025, Emotion, PDF here).
publications & presentations
Publications
Hanson, J. L., Adkins, D. J., Kahhale, I., Sen, S. (2026). Positive Affect as a Developmental Mediator of
Early Adversity and Internalizing Psychopathology. Journal of Child Psychology & Psychiatry. PDF.
Kahhale, I., Hackel, L. & Zaki, J., (2025). Balancing Emotional Scales: Empathy and Dehumanization in Legal Contexts. Emotion. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001559. PDF
Kahhale, I., Byrd, A. L., Hanson, J. L., (2025). Exploring the Nexus of Early Life Adversity and Empathy: A Comprehensive Review of Past Research and Recommendations for Future Directions. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-025-00516-8. PDF
Byrd, A. L., Kahhale, I., Vize, C., Griffith, R., Viding, E., Stepp, S. (2025). Expanding contingency learning models of aggression: conceptual and methodological considerations to enhance clinical utility. Aggression and Violent Behavior. PDF.
Reddan, M., Ong, D. C., Wager, T. D., Mattek, S., Kahhale, I., Zaki, J. (2025). Neural signatures of emotional intent and inference align during social consensus. Nature Communications, 16, 6156. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-59931-8. PDF
Kahhale, I., Barry, R. K., Ong, D. C., Zaki, J., Hanson, J. L., (2024). Exploring the Role of Empathy in
the Association Between Early Life Adversity and Antisocial Behavior. Affective Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-024-00280-y. PDF
Kahhale, I., Puccetti. N. A., Heller, A. S., Hanson, J. L. (2024). Probing connections between social connectedness, mortality risk, and brain age: A preregistered study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000465. PDF
Kahhale, I., Farrise, K., Das, A., McPhee, J., Galán, C.A., Scholars for Elevating Equity and Diversity (SEED), and Park, A. (2024). Recognizing the impact of racism-based traumatic stress on youth: Implications for research and clinical practice. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2024.03.022. PDF
Hanson, J. L., Kahhale, I., Sen, S. (2024). Integrating Data Science and Neuroscience in Developmental Psychopathology: Formative Examples and Future Directions. Development and Psychopathology. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0954579424001056. PDF
Kahhale, I., Hanson, J.L., Raine, A., Byrd A.L. (2024). Associations Between Subtypes of Empathy and Aggression in High-Risk Adolescents. J Psychopathol Behav Assess. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-023- 10112-1. PDF
Hanson, J. L., O’Connor, K., Adkins, D. J., & Kahhale, I. (2024). Childhood Adversity and COVID-19 Outcomes: Findings from the UK Biobank. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. https://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2023/11/01/jech-2023-221147?rss=1. PDF
Kahhale, I., Barry, K., Hanson, J. L. (2023). Positive parenting moderates associations between childhood stress and corticolimbic structure. PNAS Nexus. https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad145. PDF
Kahhale, I., Buser, Nicholas J., Madan, Christopher R., Hanson, Jamie L. (2023). Quantifying numerical and spatial reliability of amygdala and hippocampal subdivisions in FreeSurfer. Brain Informatics. http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s40708-023-00189-5. PDF
Richie-Halford, A., Cieslak, M., Ai, L., Caffarra, S., Covitz, S., The Fibr Community Science Consortium... & Rokem, A. (2022). An analysis-ready and quality controlled resource for pediatric brain white-matter research. Scientific Data, 9(1), 1-27.
Bacas, E., Kahhale, I., Raamana, P.R., Pablo, J.R., Anand, A.S., Hanson, J.L.(2023). Probing Multiple Algorithms to Calculate Brain Age: Examining Reliability, Relations with Demographics, and Predictive Power. Human Brain Mapping. https://doi.org/10.1002/hbm.26292. PDF
Kahhale, I. ,(2022). The Promise of Prediction: Review of Glenn & Raine, Nat Rev Neuro, 2014.Invited submission to Nature Reviews Psychology. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s44159-022-00027-1. PDF
Galán, C., Tung, I., Tabachnick, A.,Sequeira, S., Novacek, D.M., Kahhale, I.,...Bekele, B.(2022). Combatting the conspiracy of silence: Clinician recommendations for talking about racism and racism- related events with youth of color. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychology. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/kuryx. Selected by JAACAP as an “Editor’s Best of 2022” article. PDF
Ong, D.C., Wu, Z., Zhi-Xuan, T., Reddan, M., Kahhale, I., Mattek, A. ,& Zaki,J. (2019). Modeling emotion in complex stories: the Stanford Emotional Narratives Dataset. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/taffc.2019.2955949. PDF
Seligowski, A.V., Lebois, L.A.M., Hill, S.B., Kahhale, I., Wolff, J.D., Jovanovic, T., Winternitz, S.R., Kaufman, M. L., & Ressler, K. J., (2019). Autonomic responses to fear conditioning among women with PTSD and dissociation. Depression and Anxiety. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/da.22903. PDF
Recent Presentations
Kahhale I., Sen, S., Byrd, A., & Hanson, J. (2026). Early Life Adversity Predicts Declining Empathy from Childhood to Adolescence. Talk at Society for Affective Science (SAS) conference, March 2026.
Kahhale, I., Marquis, S., Tung, E., Batejan, K., & Worden, P. (2026). Unique Associations between Interpersonal Sensitivity and Externalizing Behavior Subdimensions in High-Risk Adolescents. Poster at Harvard Psychiatry Research Day.
Kahhale, I., Falls, A., Marquis, S., Tung, E., Batejan, K., & Worden, P. (2026). Childhood threat uniquely predicts symptoms of Borderline Personality Disorder in high-risk adolescents. Poster at McLean Hospital Research Day.
Kahhale, I. (2025). Latent Growth Curve Modeling: Theoretical Applications and Tutorial in R. A talk presented at the Committee for Advanced Methodological Learning (CAMeL) in fulfillment of the Pitt. Quantitative Minor, March 20, 2025.
Kahhale, I. & Hanson, J. L. (2024). Adolescent Brain Development: Important Factors to Consider in Sentencing Youth. Invited talk by the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth, presented at a training for Ohio Public Defenders parole board members. November 15th, 2024.
Kahhale, I., Hanson, J. L., Raine, Adrian, Byrd, A. L. (2024). Socioemotional brain structure and connections with subtypes of aggression. Poster at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Department of Psychiatry Research Day, June 13, 2024.
Kahhale, I. (2024). Exploring the Nexus of Early Life Adversity and Empathy: A Comprehensive Review of Past Research and Recommendations for Future Directions. Research talk presented to the Department of Psychology Jeremy Johnson Landen Award Event, April 2024.
Kahhale, I. (2024). Treating Trauma and Suicidality in a Minoritized Adolescent: a Cultural Case Conceptualization & Presentation. Talk presented to Pitt Clinical Students, March 20th, 2024.
Kahhale, I., Hanson, J. L. (2024). Probing connections between social connectedness, mortality risk, and brain age: A preregistered study. Poster presented at the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society Conference (April 10-13, 2024).
Kahhale, I., Hanson, J. L., Raine, Adrian, Byrd, A. L. (2023). Emotion regulatory brain structure and
normative deviations: connections with subtypes of aggression. Poster at Developmental Affective Neuroscience Symposium Conference, November 9th 2023.
Kahhale, I., Hanson, J. L., Raine, Adrian, Byrd, A. L (2023). Socioemotional brain structure and
normative deviations: Connections with subtypes of empathy and aggression. Invited Flash Blitz Talk at Aggression and Violent Behavior Conference, October 2023.
Kahhale, I., Barry, K., Hanson, J. L. (2023). Empathic Accuracy Moderates the Association between
Early Life Adversity and Adult Antisocial Behavior. Data Blitz Talk at Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy Early Career Event, May 2023.
Kahhale, I., Barry, K., Hanson, J. L. (2023). Empathic Accuracy Moderates the Association between
Early Life Adversity and Adult Delinquency. Poster presented at Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy Early Career Event, May 2023.
Kahhale, I., Barry, K., Hanson, J. L. (2023). Positive Parenting Moderates Associations between
Childhood Stress and Corticolimbic Structure. Poster presented at SRCD biennial meeting, March 2023.
Kahhale, I., Barry, R. K., Hanson, J. L., (2023). Empathic Accuracy Moderates the Association between
Early Life Adversity and Adult Delinquency. Flash talk presented at Society for Affective Science (SAS) Meeting, April 2023.
Symposium Chair, Heterogeneity in Externalizing Psychopathology: the Contribution of Multiple
Etiological Pathways across Childhood and Adolescence (2023). Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) biennial meeting symposium, March 2023.
Kahhale, I., Hanson, J. L., Raine, Adrian, Byrd, A. L. (2023). Associations between Empathy and
Aggression Subtypes in High-Risk Adolescents. Symposium talk at SRCD biennial meeting, March 2023.
