I study transdiagnostic cognitive processes in internalizing psychopathology, including repetitive thought, subjective attentional problems, and mindfulness, using intensive longitudinal assessment and advanced quantitative methods.

Facets of state mindfulness as predictors of repetitive thought onset: A multilevel analysis of intensive longitudinal data

My dissertation research (proposal approved June 2025) leverages multilevel structural equation modeling and intensive longitudinal data to examine within-person associations between momentary experiences of mindfulness, repetitive thought, and negative affect. This project aims to examine the mechanisms, such as metacognitive awareness and nonjudgment of current experience, by which mindfulness may be able to disrupt repetitive thought processes. Characterizing these pathways may strengthen the theoretical foundation for brief interventions that aim to implement mindfulness as a momentary regulation strategy for internalizing symptoms. 

State mindfulness and perseverative thought: A systematic review of experimental and ecological momentary assessment research

In my comprehensive examination for doctoral candidacy, currently a first-authored manuscript in prep, I conducted a systematic review and narrative synthesis of the literature examining the momentary impact of mindfulness on perseverative thought. My review integrated findings from multiple methodologies, including experimental methods (e.g., mindfulness induction and pre-post induction change in perseverative thought), ecological momentary assessment (e.g., within-person associations between state mindfulness and perseverative thought in daily life), and ecological momentary interventions (an emerging method that administers brief mindfulness inductions in daily life and measures their immediate and prospective impact on outcomes of interest).

Anxiety, worry, and subjective difficulty concentrating: A longitudinal examination of concurrent and prospective symptom relationships

In this first-authored manuscript published in Behavior Therapy, I investigated the associations between anxiety, worry, and difficulty concentrating in a multisite longitudinal dataset collected from April to November 2020, along with coauthors from the COVID-19 Mental Health Workgroup. I used multilevel modeling to examine between- and within-person associations between anxiety, worry, and difficulty concentrating, and structural equation modeling to evaluate worry as a mediator of the longitudinal association between anxiety and difficulty concentrating. 

A narrative systematic review of changes in mental health symptoms from before to during the COVID-19 pandemic

In this first-authored invited systematic review for Psychological Medicine, I and my coauthors created a narrative synthesis of 97 prospective longitudinal studies that directly compared population-level psychopathology symptoms from before to during the pandemic. The review examined six internalizing psychopathology symptom clusters – anxiety, depression, OCD, fear, PTSD, and general distress – in the context of sample characteristics with different symptom change profiles, including age groups across the lifespan, individuals with psychiatric and medical diagnoses, undergraduate students, veterans, birthing parents, and sexual and gender minorities. 

A temporal investigation of the relationship between difficulty concentrating and perseverative thought

I served as co-mentor to Paige DeGennaro for her undergraduate honors thesis research, now published in Journal of Anxiety Disorders. Paige used EMA data to investigate concurrent and prospective within-person bidirectional relationships between subjective difficulty concentrating and perseverative thought severity.

The SocialVidStim: a video database of positive and negative social evaluation stimuli for use in social cognitive neuroscience paradigms

I coauthored this manuscript from my postbac lab, published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. In my role as lab manager, I oversaw stimuli editing for a database of about 2000 individual videos, managed data collection efforts, and programmed MATLAB scripts to prepare over 125,000 rows of validity and reliability data for analysis.