Consultants & Collaborators

Laura Carstensen is the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. Her most current empirical research focuses on ways in which motivational changes influence cognitive processing.

Susan South, PhD, is a Professor of Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University. Her research investigates the links between marriage, personality, and psychopathology.  Her research is concerned with the assessment of marital satisfaction, links between mental illness and relationship distress, gene-environment interplay between marital dysfunction and mental illness, and behavior genetics, particularly as it relates to personality and relationships.

Dr. Balsis’ research focuses on using advanced quantitative techniques to improve the assessment and understanding of clinical disorders (personality disorders, depression, Alzheimer’s disease, etc.). One line of his work shows that many psychological disorders present themselves differently across the lifespan because the social, occupational, and physiological contexts change and influence the expression of these disorders. Another line of work focuses on improving the measurement of dementia. The goal of those studies is to hasten the early detection of Alzheimer’s disease, which is a critical step in managing the disease.

I am an Assistant Professor and received my PhD at the University of Kentucky in Clinical Psychology in 2020. I am interested in the multi-method assessment of personality and psychopathology and their effects on health across time. I use artificial intelligence to improve the assessment of personality and psychopathology through speech and language. My career began as a Research Assistant conducting interviews in the SPAN lab from 2010 to 2012.

At the broadest sense, Dr. Liao is interested in identifying the affective, cognitive, and sociocultural processes that shape long and meaningful lives. Her research addresses three broad questions: (1) What factors contribute to meaningful lives? (2) How do individual life experiences, particularly those that are personally significant and challenging, shape the pursuit of meaning across the adult life span in diverse contexts? (3) What emotional and cognitive gains and losses might be involved in the process of striving for meaningfulness?

Dr. Carlson directs the Self-Knowledge and Interpersonal Perception (SKIP) lab, which is concerned with if, when, and how people know what they and others are like as well as if this knowledge is adaptive. For example, she and her graduate students explore questions such as whether people know their reputation and if seeing other people accurately fosters friendship development. They also explore individual differences in who is especially self-aware (or not) and mechanisms for improving self-knowledge.

Professor Widiger’s research interests are concerned generally with the diagnosis and classification of psychopathology. More specifically, he is interested in the validity of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV); dimensional models of personality disorder; assessment of personality disorders with self-report inventories, unstructured clinical interviews, and semi-structured clinical interviews; gender biases in the diagnosis of mental disorders; the relationship of personality to psychopathology; and the differentiation of normal from abnormal psychological functioning.

Emily Willroth, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research investigates psychosocial wellbeing and health across the adult lifespan.