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Mental Health
Mental health, broadly defined, is central to psychology. It has long been a focus of interest in this department, with American Psychological Association (APA) accredited programs in both clinical and counseling psychology. Funded and very active research programs in our department investigate processes underlying psychopathology, including development of more effective assessment and intervention strategies, focusing on clinical disorders including schizophrenia, addictive behaviors, personality disorders, and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. There are also active research programs on societal problems including interpersonal relationships, childhood maltreatment, homelessness, and spousal abuse.
Jack J. Blanchard
Professor and Department Chair
BPS 1123L
Research Summary : Dr. Blanchard conducts research examining the psychopathology of schizophrenia and schizotypy. This research involves understanding the emotional, social, and neurocognitive changes associated with these disorders. Much of his research has focused on understanding how emotion is altered in schizophrenia and how individual differences in affective traits are related to other aspects of the disorder including social dysfunction, stress reactivity, and cognitive impairment. Related to this work on emotion, Dr. Blanchard's lab has sought to understand how decreased hedonic capacity might serve as an indicator of the genetic liability for schizophrenia. Another focus of his lab is the development of new assessment approaches for the measurement of negative symptoms in schizophrenia.
Jude Cassidy
Professor
BPS 2147C
Research Summary : Jude Cassidy is professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland, and director of the Maryland Child and Family Development Laboratory. She received her Ph.D in 1986 from the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on attachment, social and emotional development in children and adolescents, social information-processing, peer relations, early intervention, and longitudinal prediction of adolescent risk behavior from earlier family interactions. Dr. Cassidy serves as co-Editor of the journal Attachment and Human Development, and along with Phillip Shaver, is the co-Editor of the Handbook of Attachment (2008). She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, and received the Boyd R. McCandless Young Scientist Award from the American Psychological Association. Her research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Andrea M. Chronis-Tuscano
Associate Professor
BPS 1123K
Research Summary : Dr. Chronis-Tuscano's research focuses broadly on understanding early predictors of developmental outcomes for children with Attention- Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and developing novel treatments which target these early risk and protective factors. Much of this research has addressed issues related to maternal parenting and psychopathology (namely, maternal depression and ADHD). A secondary line of research, conducted in collaboration with faculty in Human Development, aims to examine the trajectory of young children displaying early behavioral inhibition, including the development of psychopathology, and to intervene by targeting key moderators of outcome (e.g., parenting and social relationships). Recent projects conducted by Dr. Chronis-Tuscanos research group include: (1) the development and evaluation of an integrated parenting program for depressed mothers of children with ADHD; (2) examination of early predictors of developmental outcomes in a large sample of preschool-aged children with and without ADHD; and (3) development and evaluation of a parent-child intervention for families of inhibited preschool-aged children. Dr. Chronis-Tuscano is the Associate Editor of the Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology; on the APA Division 12 Presidential Task Force on Enhancing Graduate Training in Evidence-Based Practice in Psychology (link to come); and serves as the Scientific Advisor to the NIMH Outreach Partnership with the State of Maryland. She is the recipient of multiple NIH grants and has served on the NIMH Interventions Committee for Children and their Families. She is the 2013 recipient of the College of Behavioral & Social Sciences Teaching & Mentoring Award.
Andres De Los Reyes
Assistant Professor
BPS 3123H
Research Summary : Dr. De Los Reyes received his Ph.D. in 2008 from Yale University. He completed his training at the APA-accredited clinical internship at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Department of Psychiatry, Institute for Juvenile Research. Dr. De Los Reyes is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and Director of the Comprehensive Assessment and Intervention Program (CAIP) at the University of Maryland at College Park. His research seeks to understand why assessments of child and adolescent mental health often yield inconsistent conclusions. Commonly used informants of child and adolescent mental health, such as parents and teachers, often vary in where they observe children and adolescents, such as home and school settings. Thus, informants differ in their opportunities for observing child and adolescent mental health concerns. With an emphasis on assessments of adolescent social anxiety, Dr. De Los Reyes investigates how inconsistencies in mental health assessments reveal meaningful information about the contexts within which children and adolescents express mental health concerns. A key goal of this work is to enable researchers and practitioners to use inconsistencies in child and adolescent mental health assessments as key tools for understanding the etiology, classification, and treatment of child and adolescent mental health.
Lea R. Dougherty
Assistant Professor
BPS 1123G
Research Summary : Dr. Doughertys research interests lie broadly in the examination of the etiology and course of depression from a developmental, life-span perspective. Within this domain, her research focuses on three areas: (1) an examination of the developmental origins of risk for depression, with a particular focus on early neuroendocrine functioning, individual differences in affect and temperament/personality, and examining associations between potential endophenotypes for depression and specific genotypes; (2) understanding the phenomenology of depression and mood dysregulation in preschoolers and establishing empirically-based assessment and treatment approaches for affective disorders in very young children; and (3) investigating the neural basis of emotion regulation and the effects of early experience and stress on brain development.
Julia Felton
Assistant Professor
BPS 1123M
Research Summary : My research focuses broadly on gender differences in developmental psychopathology. Specifically, I am interested in risk factors related to depression and substance use during adolescence and the role of stress and maladaptive coping styles in the development of these mental health disorders. I am also interested in longitudinal data modeling and related techniques. Prior to joining the University of Maryland, I received my PhD from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee and completed a clinical internship and postdoctoral fellowship at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, South Carolina. Currently, I serve as the Director of the MPS in Clinical Psychological Sciences Program.
Charles J. Gelso
Professor
BPS 2147J
Research Summary : The focus of my theoretical and empirical research is the client-therapist relationship in psychotherapy of differing orientations. Within this broad area, I focus more specifically on constructs such as the client-therapist working alliance, client transference, therapist countertransference, and what is termed the real or personal relationship between therapist and client. My research on countertransference lead to a book in 2007 entitled Countertransference and the Therapist's Inner Experience: Perils and Possibilties (NJ: Erlbaum) and I am currently writing a book on the real or personal relationship in psychotherapyt (to be published by the American Psychological Association). My current empirical research efforts focus on countetransference and the real relationship in therapy, both brief and longer-term treatment.
Clara E. Hill
Professor
BPS 2147G
Research Summary : I am primarily interested in what makes psychotherapy work. Within this general topic, I focus on the skills therapists use to help clients, working directly with the therapeutic relationship, utilizing dreams to lead to greater insight and action, and training and supervising therapists to help them become more effective in their work with clients. In addition, I am very interested in discovering new and better ways to investigate psychotherapy, and have been working on developing qualitative methods that capture more of the inner experiences of participants in the psychotherapy process. To investigate psychotherapy more thoroughly and to train therapists, we have recently established the Maryland Psychotherapy Clinic and Research Lab.
Carl Lejuez
Professor, Director of the Clinical Program, Director, Center for Addictions, Personality, and Emotion Research (CAPER)
BPS 1123C
Research Summary : Dr. Lejuez's current clinical and research interests focus on the development of ecologically valid laboratory analogues of addiction and their use to better understand the active ingredients of treatment (i.e., translational research). His most recent projects involve (1) the creation and validation of a behavioral task to predict adolescent risk-taking behaviors (e.g., drug use, unsafe sexual practices); (2) the examination of factors underlying addictions treatment failure (e.g., low distress tolerance); (3) the development of novel treatments of co-morbid depression and anxiety among substance users with behavioral activation strategies; (4) factors underlying drug choice differences (e.g., crack/cocaine vs. heroin) among inner-city substance users; and (5) mechanisms underlying AXIS II Personality Disorders (primarily Borderline PD and Antisocial PD), with a focus on inner-city substance using samples.
Laura MacPherson
Associate Professor
Cole Field House 2103E
Research Summary : Research Summary : Dr. MacPhersons clinical and research interests include a developmentally-informed examination of the progression and cessation of addictive behaviors among adolescents and young adults to improve youth-tailored interventions, as well as developing behavioral treatments for adult smokers with psychiatric comorbidities. Current projects and interests include: 1) developing and testing behavioral activation-based cessation interventions for adult and adolescent smokers with co-occurring psychopathology with a focus on reward processing mechanisms underlying treatment effects, 2) identifying trajectories of appetitive (e.g., risk taking propensity) and avoidant (e.g., distress tolerance) reinforcement based processes as they relate to changes in adolescent substance use and risk behaviors over time, and 3) developing behavioral assessments of negative reinforcement-based risk taking among youth.
Jonathan Mohr
Assistant Professor
BPS 2147K
Research Summary : I study manifestations and consequences of stigma, discrimination, and stereotypes in everyday life, particularly with respect to lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. Some of my work is on the experiences both positive and negative of individuals from stigmatized groups, whereas some is on attitudes and behaviors toward members of stigmatized groups. I have a secondary research program on interpersonal relationships, with an emphasis on romantic relationships and the psychotherapy relationship. These two lines of scholarship intersect in my writing on same-sex couples and psychotherapy with sexual minority clients. My work is based on theoretical perspectives from social and personality psychology, including attachment theory, minority stress theory, and theories of collective identity formation.
Karen M. O'Brien
Professor
BPS 2147D
Research Summary : Counseling psychologists have a rich tradition of advancing scholarly knowledge and providing services to healthy individuals in times of crisis or transition (Gelso & Fretz, 2000). As scientist-practitioners and as psychologists, we are invited to use our knowledge to better the lives of individuals and contribute to the improvement of our society (American Psychological Association, 2003). Through my research, teaching, and service, I strive to generate knowledge that can be used to address social concerns and individual problems, to educate students to achieve their research and clinical potential, and to actively contribute to the communities in which I live and work. I have two areas in which I seek to advance knowledge in counseling psychology. The primary focus of my research program is to further understanding regarding the circumscription of women in low status, low paid occupations. Recently, I have begun to investigate factors related to healthy functioning in adoptive families.
Kevin E. O'Grady
Associate Professor
BPS 3147F
Research Summary : My quantitative research interests focus on three specific areas: 1) psychometric theory, particularly the strengths and weaknesses of classical true-score theory for the measurement and assessment of individual differences; 2) The design and analysis of controlled clinical trials, and the use of the generalized linear mixed model in the analysis of such designs; and, 3) latent variable modeling, and in particular, the utility and limitations of latent variable growth curve and latent class growth mixture models in the assessment of change over time. My interests in substance abuse have focused on: 1) the etiology of such abuse, particularly those individual, familial, and social factors that place an individual at increased risk for the development of a drug-abusing lifestyle; 2) the development of conceptually-based prevention programs that seek to impact at-risk individuals, where such programs are based on information about the risk factors of the individuals involved, that is, prevention and intervention programs that are directed by the risk-factor information available from the participants (rather than the development of broader-based prevention programs that attempt to cast a larger net); and, 3) the development of conceptual models that explain responsiveness to drug-abuse treatment for drug-abusing individuals, where such models utilize the results of baseline assessment information to explain differential responsiveness to treatment.
Elizabeth Redcay
Assistant Professor
Research Summary : My research examines the development and neural bases of communicative behaviors (e.g. joint attention, theory of mind, social interaction, language) and the interactions between these processes in both typical individuals and individuals with autism (a developmental disorder characterized by atypical communication). I ask how and the extent to which the brain systems underlying these behaviors become specialized and how this neural specialization is reflected in behavioral changes. To examine these questions, I use neuroimaging and behavioral methods with infants, children, adolescents and adults. In some of this research, I use paradigms in which participants engage in a real-time face-to-face communication during fMRI data acquisition, allowing for a more naturalistic social-communicative interaction.
