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Core Faculty of the Clinical Program

Tara McAuley, Assistant Professor
(B.Sc., University of Toronto; Ph.D. Washington University)

My research interests pertain to the development of executive control - a set of inter-related skills that facilitate purposeful, goal-oriented behaviour. My goal as a clinician scientist is to cultivate a programme of research in which the promotion of these skills is an overarching theme. Specific foci include: (1) modeling executive control across development, with a particular focus on transitional periods that occur in early childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, (2) identifying factors that influence the development of executive control, including neurobiological risk, psychosocial adversity, and social-cultural context, (3) further elucidating the relationship between executive control and other domains of function, including academic achievement, emotional adjustment, and peer relations, and (4) developing interventions that strengthen core executive skills. My research examines these questions in the context of typical and atypical development using converging behavioural and neuroimaging methods.

***Professor McAuley will be accepting one new student into her lab for the upcoming 2012-13 admission year.***

David Moscovitch, Associate Professor
(BSc, Toronto; MA, PhD, Boston University)

My research examines the nature and treatment of adult anxiety, with a particular focus on cognitive-behavioural models of social anxiety. The broad research questions that are currently of interest to me and my students include the following:

1) How do socially anxious individuals view and appraise themselves and others, and how do such appraisals impact emotion regulation, information processing, and social behaviour?

2) What are the emotional, behavioural, and interpersonal correlates, causes, and consequences of negative self-perception in social anxiety, and how might these relate to physiological events in the brain and body?

3) How are appraisals of self and others represented in the thoughts, images, and autobiographical memories of socially anxious individuals and what are the specific cues that may activate or inhibit their retrieval across contexts?

4) What are the mechanisms of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) for social anxiety disorder and is it possible to improve treatment outcomes by customizing CBT interventions to target idiosyncratic symptom profiles of individual patients?

Much of my current research on social anxiety is guided by (and geared toward testing) the theoretical framework proposed in Moscovitch (2009). What is the core fear in social phobia? A new model to facilitate individualized case conceptualization and treatment. Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, 16, 123-134. Copies of this paper and other recent or representative articles from our lab can be accessed by clicking on the hyperlinks imbedded in the publication list below. ***Professor Moscovitch will not be accepting any new students into his lab for the upcoming 2012-13 admission year.***

Liz Nilsen, Assistant Professor
(BA, Victoria; MSc, Acadia; PhD, Calgary)

My research program generally focuses on cognitive development in the preschool and school years, with a specific focus on children’s communication skills. Successful communication entails recognition of the social and situational context as well as appreciation for one’s conversational partner’s perspective (e.g., his/her knowledge state). My research investigates children’s sensitivity to another’s perspective and the degree to which they are able to use this information to guide their communicative behaviours (such as producing clear statements, correctly interpreting statements from others, working in a cooperative manner, and understanding figurative language). Current research focuses on the developmental course of various communicative behaviours, underlying cognitive skills necessary for children to successfully navigate their social world, as well as individual differences and contextual factors that influence communicative behaviour.
The research in my lab investigates the skills of typically-developing children and children who show atypical development (e.g., children with ADHD, children with socially withdrawing behaviour, etc.). Several recent projects also examine the communicative patterns of adults who experience symptoms of ADHD.

***Professor Nilsen will be accepting one new student into her lab for the upcoming 2012-13 admission year.***

Jonathan Oakman, Associate Professor
(BA, PhD, Waterloo)

My current research interests are focused on the scientific and practical utility of single-case designs. The use of single-case designs has been impeded by data analytic complexities that have led to uncertainty about how best to analyze such data. I am examining the performance of a number of recent data analytic innovations that are intended for single case data. Extensions of this work include 1) studying a system of variables within an individual over time, 2) evaluating the utility of various single case data analytic methods under “real-world” conditions such as having unequally spaced observations and/or substantial missing data, 3) applications of these methods in a variety of real-world contexts. This work is underway in collaboration with Dr. Walter Mittelstaedt and Dr. Erik Woody.

Dr. Oakman currently serves as the Director of Clinical Training.

***Professor Oakman and Professor Mittelstaedt will jointly be accepting one new student for the upcoming 2012-13 admission year.***

Christine Purdon, Professor
(BA, Western Ontario; MA, PhD, New Brunswick)

I am interested in how anxiety disorders develop and why they persist. I have been especially curious about what happens when people with anxiety problems try to suppress unwanted thoughts. How do attempts to control thoughts actually affect their frequency? What happens when control efforts fail? This research has particular implications for understanding why obsessions develop and persist.

More recently, I have become interested in why compulsions persist. My students and I are looking at the impact of repeated actions on doubt and certainty about whether an action has been performed correctly.

I am also interested in changes in attentional focus that happen when people become anxious. My students and I are looking at whether people overly-attend to threat-relevant stimuli when they are anxious, and/or whether they have trouble disengaging their attention from threat. We are also interested in differences in attentional biases between people with and without anxiety problems. This work is done in close collaboration with Dr. Dan Smilek who is a leading expert on attention.

Please be advised that I will not be taking any new students in the fall of 2013

***Professor Purdon will be accepting one new student for her lab for the upcoming 2012-13 admission year.***

Uzma Rehman, Associate Professor
(BA, International Univeristy; PhD, Indiana)

My research focuses on intimate relationships. Specifically, I am interested in examining the impact of intrapersonal (e.g., psychopathology), dyadic (e.g., marital communication behaviors), and broader contextual variables (e.g., acculturation stress) and the interaction between these three levels of analysis on the course, quality, and outcome of intimate romantic relationships. Related to this, I have examined the association between communication behaviors and patterns, such as demand-withdraw, and relationship dysfunction across different cultures. 

In recent studies, my students I have been investigating the impact of stress, such as partner depression, on the romantic relationship and the mechanisms by which intimate relationships buffer, or exacerbate, perceptions of stress.  Using a variety of different methodologies (e.g., observational, daily diary, self-report), we are testing transactional models of relationship distress and depression.  For example, we are conducting a multi-wave, prospective study to examine the longitudinal association between marital distress an depression.  In another study, we are using information-processing models to investigate the specific interpersonal deficits of depressed individuals.  Based on the findings from these and other studies, I plan to develop and test treatment programs that focus both on reducing depressive symptoms and improving the quality of interpersonal relationships of depressed individuals. 

Erik Woody, Professor
(BA, Reed; MS, Oxford; PhD, Duke)

My current research interests fall into four areas: (1) the psychology of potential threat and obsessive-compulsive disorder; (2) hypnosis, including individual differences, underlying mechanisms, and clinical applications; (3) interpersonal theory, including the social aspects of personality and processes of social interaction; and (4) the development and promulgation of novel statistical methods for application in clinical psychology.

***Professor Woody will not be accepting any new students into his lab for the upcoming 2012-13 admission year.***

Part-Time Adjunct Faculty

In addition to the services of the core faculty, the clinical training component of our program includes a permanent position for a full-time Centre Director, currently Dr. Walter Mittelstaedt. We also make use of a range of adjunct faculty drawn from neighbouring institutions such as the Anxiety Treatment and Research Centre (Hamilton), Lutherwood (Waterloo), Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo), and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (Toronto). In addition to providing close supervision of students' clinical work, these adjunct faculty assist in the teaching of certain professional skills courses. Adjunct faculty from neighbouring institutions also sometimes assist with the research supervision of some of our students, thereby expanding the range of available research topics.