Professor and Chair of Psychology
Ph.D., 2000, Freie Universitat Berlin, Germany
My lab’s primary research goal is to gain a better understanding of how basic cognitive processes and individual differences in emotion and mood regulation increase the risk for the onset of depression and anxiety disorders, and hinder recovery from these disorders. Our main areas of interest include the identification of cognitive risk factors for depression, research on the comorbidity of anxiety and depression, and research on emotion regulation. Our current work examines attention, memory, and individual differences in cognitive control in depression and investigates how these processes are linked to rumination and other forms of adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation. The work in our lab integrates a multitude of measures, including cognitive tasks, psychophysiological measures of stress reactivity and emotion regulation, neuroendocrine assessments, genotying, and brain imaging.