Whether you are a student preparing for finals, a faculty member with a looming grant deadline, or an alumnus facing life or work stressors, Professor Donna Pincus wants to help you cope.

For more than two decades, Pincus, CAS Feld Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences and Director of the BU Child and Adolescent Fear and Anxiety Treatment Program, has been focused on studying anxiety — specifically, the assessment and treatment of children’s fears and anxieties, and the development of new treatments for children and adolescents with anxiety disorders and their families, as well as risk and resilience factors affecting children’s mental health.

On Wednesday, November 30, Pincus will give the 2022 Gitner Family Lecture, “Building Bravery at BU and Beyond: Evidence-Based Strategies for Overcoming Anxiety,” explaining what anxiety is, why it becomes bothersome, and how to manage it so that, together, we can “build a braver BU community.”

Pincus joined the Boston University faculty in 1999, after earning a bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University and a Ph.D. from Binghamton University and completing a clinical internship at the University of Florida Health Sciences Center. For the past 23 years, she has directed the Child and Adolescent Anxiety Program at the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders (CARD), a clinical research center with complementary missions of facilitating child anxiety research, clinical training, clinical service, and community outreach. The Child Program at CARD supports the research and training of junior faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and doctoral, master’s and undergraduate students, while also providing specialized anxiety care for youth and families. Dr. Pincus’ most recent research focuses on novel ways to expand families’ access to evidenced based care for anxiety in community settings, such as schools, mental health clinics, and pediatric health care centers.

In Spring 2021, Pincus was named CAS Feld Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences. The Feld Family Professorship recognizes a CAS faculty member of international renown in any field who has demonstrated a sustained record of excellence in undergraduate and graduate teaching and mentoring as well as in their scholarship.

One of her nominators wrote: “She is an educator in every possible sphere and capacity. At BU, she has re-made key large undergraduate and graduate courses as immersive and interactive, inspiring hundreds of students and earning consistently dazzling evaluations. She is a remarkably talented, generous, and prolific mentor, with an incredible 44 mentor-led scholarly publications, and an impressive list of placements of her students and trainees. She leads by example: her six books and 100+ articles and chapters have created an entire field. Her research on youth panic disorder is path-breaking in conception and transformative in impact: first, by developing rigorous evidence-based clinical health treatments; second, by creating pathways to scale that scholarly work out to national and international treatment programs; and third, by communicating in every mode and at every level, from an award-winning book for children who have experienced the death of a parent to a book for parents on dealing with emotional problems in their children. She is an inspirational teacher, a life-changing mentor, a path-breaking scholar, and a bridge from the academy to the world at large.”

Ahead of her upcoming lecture, arts&sciences asked Pincus a few questions about her research on the assessment and treatment of children’s fears and anxieties, and the development of new treatments for children and adolescents with anxiety disorders.

arts&sciences: What is anxiety? Why do people get anxious?

All of us have experienced anxiety—it is a natural human emotion that can sometimes feel difficult to manage, even though in moderate levels it can sometimes help us perform better or be more prepared. Whether gearing up to give a talk or take a test, preparing for a big race, or worrying while watching the nightly news, we all probably know all too well how overwhelming anxiety can feel.

One reason why this negative mood state can be hard to handle is because it has many components—we may simultaneously have thoughts about an impending problem, feel physiological feelings like heart racing and increased muscle tension, and also exhibit behaviors such as avoidance or fidgeting. The three components of anxiety—our thoughts, physical feelings, and behaviors—taken together can feel like a perfect storm of symptoms. People can become anxious when they do not feel that they can control a situation, or when the stressfulness of the situation taxes their ability to cope. Sometimes people become anxious about realistic stressors—like an upcoming surgery, and sometimes anxiety and apprehension can rise in response to one’s thoughts—even if there is nothing to be anxious about.

Anxiety is our central nervous system’s physiological and emotional response to threat or perceived danger. There are many reasons why people get anxious. We know that there are biological contributors, as we may inherit a vulnerability to be more anxious. There are also social and psychological contributors that can increase our vulnerability to anxiety. Thankfully, our field has made major advances over the past few decades in developing methods to help people overcome interfering levels anxiety across the lifespan.

arts&sciences: Tell us more about your research.

My research focuses on advancing our understanding of the assessment and treatment of anxiety disorders in children and adolescents, with a particular focus on understudied and underserved populations of anxious youth. My work is also concentrated on investigating methods of improving youth and families’ access to evidence-based anxiety care. Our team, along with collaborators across BU, are currently testing innovative treatment delivery formats that have the potential to overcome traditional barriers to care. This work leverages technology and utilizes frontline providers in community settings such as schools and pediatric healthcare settings to expand the reach and scope of quality care.

arts&sciences: How did you get involved in studying anxiety and stress?

While in graduate school, I worked with youth and families in a range of settings­—in hospitals, in Head Start, in specialized foster care, as well as in schools. Across all of these diverse settings, I noticed the impairing effects that high levels of anxiety could have on a child’s life. I also observed how children showed significant improvements in many domains of life after they learned core skills for managing their emotional states, especially when their caregivers and educators also learned skills to best support them. The clinical observations I made by working with patients also generated many research questions—such as whether there were ways to adapt skills-based anxiety interventions to make them more acceptable and even fun for children, or whether existing psychological interventions could be modified and delivered in an expedited way to help children and adolescents return more quickly to developmentally appropriate activities.

I became interested in specializing in the field of child anxiety because it is one of the most prevalent and impairing problems that children and adolescents face, and by developing psychological interventions for these problems, there is so much potential to have a positive impact on people’s lives. Furthermore, by engaging community partners (school nurses, educators, pediatricians, etc.) we can collaboratively develop new ways to expand access to care.

arts&sciences: Why is this a relevant time to talk about anxiety?

Given that anxiety is a natural human emotion that we all experience, it is always a relevant time to talk about it and to break the stigma around talking about it. But another reason to talk about it is that the rates of anxiety problems have increased globally, not only in adults, but in children and adolescents as well. Problematic levels of anxiety can interfere with daily functioning at home, at work, or with friends; it can dampen our enjoyment of life’s activities and can impact our relationships with others. Having a variety of tools to handle the range of emotions we experience on a daily basis is critical for wellbeing.

What types of topics will you cover in the talk that will be helpful for students?

I will cover topics in the talk that are relevant for everyone, such as better understanding what anxiety is, understanding the factors that can contribute to anxiety becoming interfering, and learning how to break down anxiety into components that are much more manageable. I will demonstrate strategies that everyone in the BU community can use — students, faculty, staff, administrators, alumni, caregivers — to better understand and manage anxiety. I will also describe ongoing research project collaborations with local community partners that aim to expand families’ access to care.

Everyone could benefit from strategies to manage anxiety — whether you are a student preparing for upcoming finals, or someone who is trying to speak up more in class or meetings, or someone who is wanting to learn ways to gradually approach something you have been avoiding due to fear. By learning these skills together, and putting them into action in our lives, we can build a braver BU community.