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As a freshman at UNC-Chapel Hill, Cope Feurer wanted nothing more than to be a children’s clinical psychologist. From diploma to private practice, she imagined her professional journey as a series of milestones, each one bringing her ever closer to the dream. All she had to do was take one step at a time.

Among them: gaining experience as a student researcher.

Determined to see her plans through, Feurer joined Mitch Prinstein and his team at the Peer Relations Lab. There, she worked on a project examining how adolescents’ risk for depression was shaped by how they perceived stress in their relationships.

What began as a prerequisite to clinical practice quickly took on a much greater meaning. Although Feurer still envisioned that future, it was the first time she could see herself as a scientist, too.

Several years and one PhD later, that early curiosity about how teens experience stress has evolved into a full research agenda. Now a Carolina professor and member of the Child and Adolescent Anxiety and Mood Disorders Program (CHAAMP), Feurer studies the stressful origins of one of the most common psychiatric disorders among teenage girls worldwide: depression.

Stress as a catalyst

After defending her PhD dissertation, Feurer took a fellowship in neural imaging methods at The University of Illinois Chicago, where she would be granted her first faculty role. After receiving an award from the National Institute of Mental Health to launch a large independent project, she considered where she wanted to build a long-term research career. After scouring departments across the country that excelled in adolescent-focused research, CHAAMP stood out as a front-runner.

“I was looking for a place where I wouldn’t be siloed and doing things on my own but would have colleagues to collaborate with,” she recalls. “A place where I could create among a strong community.”

As Feurer’s academic career took shape, she continued working directly with teens as a therapist. It was in those sessions that she began to notice a troubling trend.

Children entering adolescence tend to show relatively low rates of clinical depression. But by the late teen years, those rates nearly double. This is especially true for girls, about a third of whom experience a depressive episode by age 18. Feurer suspected that the answer to “why” was buried somewhere within this developmental window.

She began with a well-established fact: Stress plays a major role in depression risk. Part of that risk comes from external stress exposure — difficult experiences that happen to someone, disrupting their well-being. But Feurer is interested in a specific source of stress exposure: stress generation, or how a person’s own responses and behaviors can unintentionally create additional stress in their lives.

For example, interpreting a neutral comment as hostile might trigger a defensive reaction, escalating a situation that otherwise would have remained harmless. Over time, these patterns can shape a person’s relationships — and their mental health.

“We are not simply passive recipients of our environment,” Feurer explains. “We interact with it, and it responds. Individuals who have depression are more likely to endure higher levels of stress, and some of it comes from stressors they may have had some role in shaping.”

Some behavioral factors have biological origins that appear years before symptoms emerge. One example is a blunted response to reward, meaning the brain reacts less strongly to positive experiences. Kids who show this pattern — especially those with a parent who has depression — are more likely to develop depression later, even before any other outward signs appear. As potential indicators of risk, these biological signals, or biomarkers, are central to Feurer’s work.

A growing signal

If biomarkers can help identify who is at risk, the next question is how that risk plays out in everyday life.

Today, Feurer is looking for predictors of stress generation in adolescent girls with at least one parent who has experienced depression. She focuses on how teens respond emotionally to negative social interactions — moments that can quickly spiral.

If a conversation doesn’t go as expected, the brain may perceive the other person as a threat. Within moments, a misunderstanding can escalate into conflict, sometimes ending a friendship.

A teen sends a text to a friend and gets a one-word reply: “OK.” To her, the brevity and the period feel cold, even irritated. She fires back, “If you’re mad, just say it.” Within minutes, both are trading heated messages over what began as a neutral response, now interpreted as hostility.

Feurer’s idea builds on earlier findings showing that teens with the highest pupil reactivity to angry faces – a marker of sensitivity to negative social cues — were more likely to experience increases in interpersonal stress over time. When faced with ambiguous or troubling clues, their instinct may be to react strongly, even when the situation isn’t truly threatening.

“The second I think I see a cue of something negative happening and I respond really strongly, is that creating a negative social interaction where there wasn’t one before?” Feurer asks.

To explore this, Feurer and her team designed a study that simulates social interaction in real time. Participants are placed in an MRI machine and given a task that makes it seem like they are interacting with other teens. Throughout the task, they are met with either acceptance or rejection from their supposed peers. Using a technique known as functional MRI, Feurer takes a snapshot of the brain’s activity at this key instant — recording the neural circuits that may be activated as each subject responds to their virtual friends.

Afterward, the teens are given a chance to reflect on how they felt during the interaction and to share any similar encounters they may have had to deal with in their daily lives. This data allows Feurer to map how emotional reactivity in the moment connects to patterns of stress over time, even if the teens themselves don’t notice.

Taking back control

While Feurer’s goal is to inspire change, she doesn’t want the revelations to come as a burden. Rather than criticize their predispositions, she wants to give teens a stronger sense of autonomy by helping them understand how they may be able to shape their environments — for better or worse.

“It’s not a question of blame, but a question of how you’re interacting with your environment in a way that may or may not be adaptive,” she says.

By linking clinical data with lived experience, Feurer aims to identify these patterns early to be ready for whatever may come later. To her, this is the purpose of therapy.

“You’re helping people figure out how to navigate their environments in a way that’s more beneficial,” she says. “Sometimes, that means learning how to respond to conflict in a way that is emotionally healthy and doesn’t make a situation worse.”

For some teens, a supportive intervention might involve learning behavioral strategies that help them reframe negative social cues and assess the situation before responding in a defensive way.

Feurer expects to wrap up recruitment for this trial by the end of this year, and early findings are already emerging: teens whose nervous systems are more reactive to negative social threats also tend to experience higher levels of depression. If these patterns hold, they could help identify at-risk teens earlier — and create opportunities to intervene before stress and symptoms compound.

As for Feurer herself, her work continues to evolve alongside new questions, logistical quirks, and serendipitous lessons as she settles into her role as a researcher. Being at her alma mater only adds to this sense of purpose.

“Being an early-career investigator means growing from the ground up,” she says. “You wear a lot of different hats, but it helps being in this setting. I’m from here, I love it here — and if this could be the final stop, that would be great.”