Kate Harkness, PhD
Professor
Room 245 Humphrey Hall
Department of Psychology, Queen's University
62 Arch Street, Kingston, ON K7L 3N6
T: 613-533-6003
F: 613-533-2499
E: harkness@queensu.ca
Research Team
Principal Investigator
Dr. Kate Harkness
Professor
B.Sc., (Hon.) Toronto, 1993
M.S., Oregon, 1995
Ph.D., Oregon, 1998
Area of research: My primary research focus is the role of stress and early trauma in the etiology and ongoing pathology of major depression in adolescence and adulthood. My current work focuses on biomarker-environment interactions that increase the biological and psychosocial sensitivity to stress in major depression.
Research Coordinator
Owen Hicks
Research Coordinator, Theory of Mind
BSc., (Hon.), Queen's University, 2020
15oph@queensu.ca
I am the research coordinator for the Mood Research Lab and am responsible for the organization and maintenance of ongoing projects in the lab.
Graduate Students
Simone Cunningham
Pre-Doctoral Residency
Area of Research: I am interested in the effects of childhood maltreatment and trauma on mental health outcomes in adolescence and adulthood, especially outcomes relating to depression and stress sensitivity. Specifically, my research focuses on whether different forms of childhood maltreatment and adversity lead to changes in stress sensitivity and reward responsivity, and how these effects might be related to depressive symptoms and anhedonia.
Chloe Hudson
Pre-Doctoral Residency
Area of Research: My primary research focuses on theory of mind—the foundational social cognitive ability that allows individuals to infer others’ internal mental states. I am interested in how theory of mind is associated with social functioning in both clinical and healthy populations.
Sung Min
PhD. Year 1
Area of Research: My primary research focus is on the etiology of depression. Specifically, I am interested in social cognition and how it plays a role in the development of depression. For my Master’s thesis, I studied cognitive biases in processing social information. For my PhD thesis, I plan to expand this subject with an evolutionary perspective.
Jessica Rowe
MSc. Year 2
Area of Research: I am interested in the effects of childhood maltreatment on neurobiological responses and how these experiences influence the development of psychopathology. I am specifically interested in how these early-life experiences lead to changes in stress response, brain activity, and brain structure in both clinical and healthy populations.
Anna Gallagher
MSc. Year 1
Area of Research: I am interested in theory of mind, the ability to understand that the mental states of others may be different from one's own. My research examines the implications of theory of mind on the development and progression of mental disorders.
Honours Student
Brie Olexa
Area of Research: I’m a fourth-year psychology major conducting my undergraduate thesis project in the Mood lab. For my thesis I’m going to be exploring the relationship between people’s ability to understand the mental states of others (theory of mind ability) and their social anxiety levels, and see how these two variables, both individually and combined, may influence people’s subjective comfort wearing a face mask during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Research Assistants
Brooke Nancekivell
brooke.nancekivell@queensu.ca
Grace Okusanya
grace.okusanya@queensu.ca
Kendall Pearce
16kap4@queensu.ca
Jordan Best
16jab23@queensu.ca
Julia Cressman
17jec6@queensu.ca
Mianzhi Hu
17mh61@queensu.ca