Research

The lab's research targets topics in the area of mental health and aging, including diagnostic and assessment issues in clinical psychology and geropsychology, suicide resilience and aging, anxiety and aging, barriers to mental health services, and the expression and impact of personality disorders across the lifespan.

The Architecture of the Mind Lab investigates the structure and function of mental systems and how they generate behavior. We approach the mind as a set of functionally organized systems shaped by evolution, drawing on principles from evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and psychology to characterize how the mind works and why it works that way.

Exploring, mapping, and navigating a person’s unique suicide risk terrain.

ATLAS is a suicide prevention research lab, established by Dr. McGraw. The mission of ATLAS is to reduce suffering and help people build lives worth living by advancing the science and practice of suicide prevention. Members of ATLAS partner alongside individuals to explore and map their unique risk for suicide, equipping them with the skills to safely navigate future periods of acute crisis.

The Behavior and Affect Underlying Emotion Research (BAUER) Lab uses a multimethod approach to better understand cognitive and affective mechanisms underlying emotion processing. Using electroencephalography (EEG) and peripheral psychophysiology, we hope to better explain how emotion-based processes work, with the goal of applying this knowledge to better understand and characterize anxiety, depression, and PTSD. 

Dr. Benight's research lab interests include the following:

• Human adaptation from trauma
• Recovery from natural disasters, man-made disasters, motor vehicle accident trauma, sexual abuse, domestic violence, and bereavement
• Social Cognitive Theory as it relates to trauma and resilience

Dr. Bistricky’s research lab interests include the following:

• Cognitive, emotional, and interpersonal factors associated with adaptation, growth, and well-being following trauma and other significant adversity
• Preferences, intervention development, and outcomes related to the use of self-regulation strategies, such as mindfulness, self-compassion, reappraisal, and acceptance
• Increasing accessibility and acceptability to catalyze, complement, and improve existing interventions
• Understanding and optimizing synergistic relations between mental health and sleep

The Cognitive Development Lab at UCCS explores the development of memory in children and adolescents. For families who are interested in participating, please visit our Participate page to learn more.

CAL's research examines how people perceive, understand, and make decisions about animals. We are especially interested in beliefs about animals’ emotional lives: whether people see animal emotions as simple or complex, instinctive or authentic, human-like or meaningful in their own right.

Dr. Littleton’s research lab interests include the following:

• Examining the role of social cognitive factors, including coping behaviors, social support, disclosure responses, and attributions, in adjustment following trauma
• The experiences of survivors of sexual assault, mass shootings, natural disasters, and intimate partner violence
• Leveraging technology to deliver efficacious intervention and prevention programming, as well as to assess victimization risk behavior and adjustment among trauma survivors
• How experiences with discrimination at the individual and institutional levels affects sexual, gender, and racial/ethnic minority individuals’ vulnerability to, and recovery from, violence

Pathways from Early experience to Regulation and Child Health Lab - The PERCH Lab is dedicated to understanding how different experiences impact children and their families. Our world is filled with a range of positive and challenging experiences, and we seek to understand how these challenging experiences can ‘get under our skin’ and what can help protect individuals who are faced with challenges such as community and family violence, poverty, illness, and loss. Ultimately, our work tries to understand these processes in order to inform the development and implementation of effective prevention, intervention, and policy efforts to help children, their families, and their communities.

The Stress, Aging, and Emotion (SAGE) Lab is a clinical geropsychology research lab.  Aging is associated with a unique set of stressors and age-related declines, many of which are uncontrollable. Despite these challenges, individuals often report positive emotional well-being into late life. The ultimate goal of the SAGE Lab is to better understand when and how older adults maintain positive health and well-being in the face of stress.

The Weiskittle Lab conducts basic and applied research to develop evidence-based clinical innovations that are directly informed by the self-reported needs of the targeted clinical population. Clinical innovations recently developed by the Weiskittle Lab have focused on caregivers, socially isolated older adults, and individuals who have experienced traumatic loss, among others.