Principal Investigator: Kevin B. Meehan, Ph.D.; kevin.meehan@liu.edu
The SCOPE Lab evaluates self-regulation, social cognition, and interpersonal functioning in both college-age and personality disordered populations. Our work seeks to understand the full spectrum of personality pathology, from the highly dysregulated and suicidal personality disordered patients being studied and treated with my colleagues at Weill Cornell Medical College (WCMC) and the Austen Riggs Center, to the distress of rejection experiences in everyday life in undergraduate participants and community members surrounding LIU. We take an experimental psychopathology approach that utilizes experience-sampling tasks (ecological momentary assessment, nightly diaries) and social cognitive tasks (facial emotion recognition, cyberball, implicit association tasks) to better understand affective and interpersonal functioning in daily life. Our recent work has focused the impact of rejection sensitivity on relational functioning, including instability in object representations and fluctuations in interpersonal perceptions over time, as assessed by ecological momentary assessment (EMA) of relational events across diverse samples. With colleagues at WCMC we are extending these findings to rejection sensitive and suicidal patients being treated for borderline personality disorder (BPD) by gathering EMA ratings of interpersonal events at three intervals of 2 weeks over an 18-month psychotherapy trial of a manualized treatment called Transference Focused Psychotherapy (TFP). We are conducting a NIH-funded multi-site study evaluating proximal indicators of suicide (1RF1MH120840-01), in collaboration with Dr. Katie Lewis (Austen Riggs Center) and Dr. Nicole Cain (Rutgers University).
Primary Research Areas:
- Self-Regulation and Vulnerabilities Towards Suicidal Behavior
- Rejection Sensitivity and Personality Pathology in Daily Life
- Effortful Control as a Buffer to Pathological Response Tendencies
- Social Cognitive Appraisals of Faces and Psychopathology
- Models of Personality Disorder
- Attachment, Mentalization, Personality, and Psychotherapy
- Transference-Focused Psychotherapy for Personality Disorders
· Collaborators
