Developmental Job Talk
Dr. Kathleen Corriveau will give a talk entitled "Children's selective trust in informants". Dr. Corriveau is a candidate for the position in the developmental area.
home / Research / Overview: Scientific Themes / Mental Health
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
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 conducts research which broadly examines evidence-based behavioral and pharmacological treatment for individuals with Attention-Defiict/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Much of her research has focused on the impact of parental psychopathology on developmental and treatment outcomes for children with ADHD. This research program involves understanding factors which confer risk for negative developmental trajectories within this population (e.g., maternal depression, ineffective parenting) and developing innovative treatments which directly target these risk factors. Recent projects have examined associations between maternal psychopathology (ADHD, depression) and parenting; the development and evaluation of behavioral parenting interventions for depressed mothers of children with ADHD; and the impact of maternal ADHD treatment on parenting and child outcomes.
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. His research program incorporates clinical, social, developmental, and cognitive psychology areas to understand why different measurements of behavior yield different conclusions in research and how these differences influence the science behind identifying effective treatments. He is also interested in what happens to children when the people in their lives do not see important aspects of their behavior in the same way. Recent projects include: (1) testing a new structured interview of caregiver-child discrepancies in perceived daily life events, (2) testing new assessment strategies for reducing parent-child rating discrepancies of childhood social anxiety, and (3) examining how parent-teacher rating discrepancies of disruptive behavior in preschoolers map onto laboratory observations of preschool disruptive behavior.
Lea R. Dougherty
Assistant Professor
BPS 1123G
Research Summary : My 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 two areas: (1) an examination of the developmental origins of neuroendocrine dysfunction in depression, which includes examining linkages between possible endophenotypes for mood disorder and specific genotypes; and (2) understanding the phenomenology of depression in preschoolers and establishing empirically-based assessment approaches for depression, and other mood disorders, in very young children. Ongoing projects include: (1) examining temperamental, familial, and environmental factors as likely determinants of a neuroendocrine pathway to depression, with a particular emphasis on the relation between temperamental vulnerability to depression and Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis functioning; (2) examining the relation between genetic polymorphisms and early HPA axis functioning; and (3) determining whether it is possible (and if so how) to distinguish between psychopathology and temperament in very young children.
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 and 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
Research Assistant Professor
Cole Field House 2103E
Research Summary : Dr. MacPhersons clinical and research interests broadly include a developmentally-informed examination of the progression and cessation of addictive behaviors among adolescents and young adults to improve youth-tailored interventions. Current projects and interests include: 1) examining distress tolerance as a mechanism underlying relapse among adolescent smokers, 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, 3) developing and testing behavioral activation-based cessation interventions for adult and adolescent smokers with a focus on reward processing mechanisms underlying treatment effects, and 4) developing instruments targeting motivational and behavioral self-change processes in adolescent and young adult substance use.
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.