Dr. McNeil received her B.A in psychology from Stanford University and her doctorate in clinical psychology from UCLA. She is an attending psychologist in UCLA’s Adolescent Partial Hospitalization Program and the ABC Child Partial Hospitalization Program. Her research interests center on positive emotions such as joy, gratitude, compassion and awe; how they are expressed among children and parents; and how a new approach that emphasizes the upregulation of positive emotions can inform the next generation of transdiagnostic interventions for youth mental health. Her work bridges research on specific positive emotions, family dynamics, health behaviors, and clinical science to examine how children’s emotions develop – in both favorable and maladaptive ways – over time. Supported by AIM Youth Mental Health, Dr. McNeil’s post-doctoral research focused developing a downward adaptation of the Positive Affect Treatment (Craske et al., 2019; 2023) for 7–12-year-olds with anxiety.

As a Friends of Semel Scholar, Dr. McNeil will conduct a pilot test of this therapy – the Youth Intervention for Positive Emotion Enhancement (YIPEE) – as compared to a time and parent-involvement matched CBT control group. This project will examine acceptability, feasibility and the initial efficacy of YIPEE as well as explore the interpersonal emotion dynamics between parent and child changes in positive emotions during the intervention. The novel target (positive emotions) tested in this project is important given that reductions in anxiety or depression do not naturally lift positive affect (and there is evidence that the opposite is true: lifting positive emotions may reduce negative affect) and because low positive affect is a likely barrier to CBT success. As several childhood conditions are characterized by negative emotions, there is considerable transdiagnostic potential should YIPEE prove successful