Melissa Soenke Email: ms0872a@american.edu

Background Information 

I recently graduated from American University with a BA in Psychology and Justice.  In the CAPER lab I work primarily with Drs. Kim Gratz and Matthew Tull investigating Borderline Personality Disorder.  While at American University I worked in the Stress and Emotions lab under Dr. Kathleen Gunthert on a longitudinal study tracking college students’ levels of stress and related emotions across a week using palm pilot surveys.  I also did some work in the Social Cognition and Automaticity Research (SCAR) lab with Dr. Clara Cheng.  I am planning to apply to doctoral programs in social psychology in the near future.

Research interests

My research interests include Terror Management Theory, death anxiety, emotion regulation, and thought suppression and ironic processing effects.  As an undergrad I conducted a study examining the effect of a mortality salience prime and religiosity on altruism from a Terror Management perspective.  I plan to continue to apply my social psychology interests and background to the research that we conduct on Borderline Personality Disorder here at CAPER.