Principal Investigator
Dr. Laura Marie Armstrong
I am currently an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a Licensed Psychologist and Health Services Provider in NC. I earned my B.S. in Psychology at Brown University and my Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at The Pennsylvania State University. I completed a pre-doctoral internship and a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at Brown University. My primary research and clinical interests are in the area of early childhood mental health. Broadly, I am interested in the role of family risk and parenting behaviors in the development of young children’s emotion regulation. This has led to two interrelated lines of research focused on: (a) understanding how young children develop the ability to use language as a way to effectively manage negative emotions and how certain child-rearing environments (e.g., parental psychopathology, poverty) may compromise this process; and (b) examining how parental beliefs, family functioning, and child adjustment influence parents’ ability to promote self-regulatory skills in their young children. My long-term goal is to refine intervention targets for low-income families raising young children.
Graduate Research Assistants
Cecily Basquin
I am a third year in the UNCC Health Psychology PhD program, Clinical Concentration. I graduated with from Elon University in 2016 with a B.A. in Psychology and minor in Criminal Justice. I am interested in parenting, family health behavior change, and the development of emotion regulation in children. My current research focuses on understanding the relationship between parent characteristics and parent readiness to change child health behaviors in families with overweight or obese children, with an emphasis on the role of parent perception of child risk.
Iris Fraude
In general, I am interested in interpersonal relationships with a primary focus on caregiver-child relationships. I am currently working on the first cross cultural validation of the DSM-5 field trial criteria and interview for parent- child relational problems in German. Other areas I am particularly interested in and plan to conduct more research on in the future include early childhood interventions, the prevention of child maltreatment, childhood mental health, roles of family risk/parenting behaviors, and the delivery of interventions for low-income families.
Jan Mooney
I am a first-year student in the Clinical Health Psychology doctoral program under the mentorship of Dr. Laura Armstrong and Dr. Jennifer Webb. My research and clinical interests include: eating disorders, anxiety, body image, and relational context. I am particularly interested in exploring the neurocognitive, physiological, and environmental correlates of emotion regulation, the processes of its development and maintenance in different relational contexts, and relationships between emotion regulation and body awareness.
Research Assistants
My name is Alecia Mercier and I am currently a second year student in the Clinical Mental Health Counseling Masters program with a concentration in play therapy. I graduated from the Florida State University with a Bachelors of Science in Psychology and Family and Child Sciences. During this time, I participated in a research lab that looked into early childhood reading interventions and literacy. My research interests are in early childhood mental health, child development, parent-child interactions and environmental barriers for children with disabilities . I have plans to graduate with my masters degree in July 2018 and continue on to a ph.d program in August of 2018.
Rebecca Blanchard
I am a masters student in clinical mental health counseling with a concentration in play therapy. My research interests are in child clinical with an emphasis in filial therapy, self-compassion, emotion-regulation, and family play therapy. My recent projects have been centered around promoting family cohesion and family functioning among transnationally adopted families. I plan to graduate in summer 2019.
Tiffany Worley
My name is Tiffany Worley, I am a Senior here at UNC Charlotte majoring in Psychology and Religious Studies. Currently, I am an Undergraduate Research Assistant working alongside Dr. Armstrong and Dr. Montanaro to develop skills of data collection, transcription, etc. My research interests include Special-Needs Education and Program Development, as well as Childhood Adversity and its Effects in Adulthood and Education. In Fall 2018 I will be applying to several Masters and PhD programs in Educational and Developmental Psychology with hopes of pursuing a graduate degree beginning in Fall 2019.