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The computer scientist Geoff Hinton, teaching students to imagine a 13-dimensional space, suggested that students first picture 3-dimensional space and then say to themselves: “Thirteen, thirteen, thirteen.” Contemporary computational models of word meaning use many more than thirteen dimensions, which can make them difficult to understand. In this talk I will discuss what a semantic dimension is and how many such dimensions there might be, and summarize the scientific evidence that suggests that high dimensional models are psychologically plausible models of lexical semantics.

Depressive and anxiety disorders are the most common and impairing illnesses, and typically first develop in adolescence. Moreover, depression, anxiety, and suicidality are tightly linked. However, relatively little is known about premorbid biopsychosocial risk factors that confer vulnerability to the first lifetime onset of these illnesses in teens. This is highly important given that even a single episode of these disorders typically leads to recurrence and chronicity and carries risk for lasting psychosocial impacts across the lifespan. In this talk, I will present findings from the ongoing Calgary Biopsychosocial Risk for Adolescent Internalizing Disorders (C-BRAID) study, a longitudinal study of adolescents with a family history of mood and anxiety disorders, thereby placing these youth at high risk for these disorders. I will present individual differences findings demonstrating that health (pain, sleep), childhood adversity, personality, and brain structure (MRI) and function (fMRI and EEG) predict the first lifetime onset of depressive and anxiety disorders as well as suicidality. In particular, given that many risk factors for depression and anxiety overlap considerably with concurrent subthreshold depressive or anxiety symptoms, I aim to identify factors that confer risk for these disorders independently of pre-existing symptoms as well as other well-established risk factors such as age and sex. I will conclude with a discussion of implications for early identification and prevention efforts directed towards high risk youth and our ongoing clinical work aimed at prevention of first lifetime onsets of mood and anxiety disorders in teens.