Renee J. Thompson, PH.D

Renee J. Thompson, PH.D

Principal Investigator

Dr. Renee Thompson is an associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and a licensed clinical psychologist (California license #26195). She graduated with a B.S. in psychology with honors and a Ph.D. in clinical-community psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She completed a clinical psychology internship at the Charleston Consortium Psychology Training Program in South Carolina. Both UIUC and Charleston Consortium are American Psychological Association-approved and members of the Academy of Psychological Clinical Science, an alliance of programs committed to the training of clinical scientists. After internship, she completed a four-year National Institute of Health-funded  postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

Dr. Thompson’s research centers on understanding the everyday emotional experience in individuals with depressive psychopathology. She uses multi-method approaches, including ecological momentary assessment, to examine  temporal dynamics of emotional experience. She is also interested in how components of emotion regulation (e.g., emotional awareness) affect the emotional experience of depressed and healthy samples. Her research is currently funded by the National Institute of Aging (R01AG070139; Role: Co-PI).

Currently, she is an associate editor at the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science (previously Journal of Abnormal Psychology) and Affective Science. She also serves as a consulting editor at Emotion. She was the program chair for the 2019 Society for Affective Science Conference and co-chaired the SPSP Emotion Preconference (2016-2018). She was elected to the Executive Board of the Society for Research in Psychopathology (2019-2021 term) and the Wash U Arts & Sciences Undergraduate Curriculum Committee (2021-2024 term).