Karen Dearing, PhD - Postdoctoral Fellow

Karen Dearing received her Ph.D in clinical psychology from the University of Delaware in 2004, after completing her internship at Lucille Packard Children's Hospital here at Stanford. Her research and clinical work has focused almost exclusively on children and adolescents. During her post-baccalaureate work at Duke University, Karen developed a strong interest in children's peer relationships and how struggles with peers relate to concurrent and future maladjustment and psychopathology. In her graduate work, Karen became interested more specifically in the mechanisms of risk in children who struggle with peers, and examined how emotion regulation, broadly construed, operates in the relation between social deficits on the one hand and externalizing and internalizing behavior on the other. Karen's passion, though, lies with the internalization of spectrum disorders. Currently, Karen is involved in research in the Gotlib lab that aims to identify mechanisms of risk for early onset depression, especially those related to social, neuroendocrine, and neurological aspects of emotion regulation.