Teresa A. Treat



Assistant Professor (Ph.D., 2000, Indiana University)

Lab Page

My research focuses primarily on applying the concepts and methods of cognitive science to advance clinical scientists' understanding of the role of cognitive processing in psychopathology. The primary strategy that I have adopted entails four steps. The first step involves developing a stimulus set that varies along dimensions that are pertinent theoretically to a particular form of psychopathology (e.g., photos of women who vary along affect and body-size dimensions, in the case of eating disorders). The second step concerns assessing the way that relevant participants process the stimulus set, using performance-based tasks to capture cognitive processes such as perceptual organization, classification, memory, and learning (e.g., similarity-ratings tasks, explicit and implicit classification tasks, recognition-memory tasks, and associative learning paradigms). As the likelihood of most forms of psychopathology varies as a function of numerous contextual factors, the third step entails characterizing the way in which these theoretically relevant factors (e.g., alcohol or taboo food consumption, fatigue, anger, and sexual arousal) influence participants' information processing. The final step involves investigating the association between these information-processing "signatures" and clinical symptoms.

Apart from my primary focus on hybrid cognitive-clinical research, I also am quite interested in the assessment and modification of social competence, as well as the development and evaluation of research-informed treatments in more traditional clinical settings. I deliberately pursue these three lines of inquiry across several content areas, with a primary focus on eating disorders and sexual violence, so that I can examine the generalizability of the relevant theoretical and measurement models.