Biography
Benito Murga graduated cum laude from the University of Notre Dame with a B. A. (Hons) in Psychology. He is currently a second-year master's student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he works with Dr. Ben Hankin at the Youth, Emotion, Development, and Intervention (YEDI) lab. He is chiefly interested in researching the development, maintenance, and treatment of internalizing psychopathology and maladaptive personality (e.g., depression, borderline personality, self-harm), employing developmental psychopathology principles, alternative models of psychopathology, and rigorous quantitative methods in his approach.
Research Interests
- Symptoms and syndromes of emotional distress (i.e., depression, anxiety, borderline personality pathology, self-injurious thoughts and behaviors)
- Developmental psychopathology principles (e.g., developmental trajectories, ecological context)
- Dimensional models (e.g., Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology) and other alternative frameworks (e.g., network analysis)
- Intensive longitudinal and idiographic (i.e., within-person) quantitative methods
Research Description
1. Symptoms profiles can be highly heterogeneous across people who are experiencing emotional distress. For example, two people with the same mood disorder diagnosis can have no symptoms in common. These high levels of heterogeneity have complicated assessment, classification, and intervention efforts. To address this limitation, dimensional models (e.g., HiTOP) have sought to understand how and which symptoms form patterns of covariation (i.e., co-occurence), creating a "structure" of psychopathology. However, most research in this area only examines between-persons variation, comparing differences across individuals sometimes at a single moment in time. There is a lack of idiographic (i.e. within-persons) research that considers how symptoms might vary in severity in the same individual over time. This independent project explores how nine symptoms of distress covary and cluster within people on a daily basis across 35 days. We use a data-driven analytic procedure, Group Iterative Multiple Model Estimation, to map a network of associations between symptoms as they vary from day to day for each individual person in our study. We are interested in 1) how varied or heterogeneous are the within-person structures of distress symptoms across people, and 2) what patterns, if any, are shared among individual-level symptom structures.
2. Borderline personality disorder is a complex syndrome characterized by pervasive and persistent patterns of affective instability, disturbed self-concept, interpersonal problems, impulsivity and aggression. Due to the high prevalence, associated mortality, and social costs of borderline pathology, understanding how it develops in early life is a critical research priority. Past research has found myriad factors influence the development of borderline pathology, including child temperament, attachment styles, negative self-concept, emotion dysregulation, trauma and stress, parental influences, and other mental disorders in both children and parents. This independent project uses an accelerated longitudinal design to 1) chart the trajectories of borderline traits as they develop over time from age 7 to 17, and 2) compare the unique effects of a variety of risk factors to understand their relative impact on the development of borderline pathology.
Education
- B.A. in Psychology (Hons) — University of Notre Dame
Grants
- Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program Academic Year Grant (2023) — Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame