About

Elise M. Clerkin is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia. Her research areas include Clinical Psychology, with a focus on understanding and advancing clinical treatments, as well as exploring social determinants of health. She is involved in research that investigates development across the lifespan, quantitative methods and data science, and the molecules, neuronal circuits, and behaviors associated with psychological processes. Her work aims to contribute to the understanding of psychological phenomena and improve clinical interventions.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Psychiatry
• Medicine
• Clinical psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Mediators and moderators of the relation between social anxiety symptoms and positive emotions: a comparison of two reminiscence strategies

  Cognition & Emotion · 2025-09-25

  articleSenior author

  Social anxiety is associated with diminished ability to savour positive emotions. This study tested whether three constructs associated with social anxiety: experiential avoidance, fear of positive evaluation, and fear of positive emotion, mediated the relation between social anxiety and increases in positive emotions following a reminiscence savouring task. The study also tested whether visual perspective adopted during reminiscence moderated these relationships. 196 college student participants were asked to reminisce from an immersed, first-person visual perspective or a distanced, third-person visual perspective. In line with hypotheses, greater social anxiety predicted greater experiential avoidance, which predicted smaller increases in positive emotions in the immersed, but not distanced, condition. There was no moderated mediation effect for fear of positive emotion. Contrary to expectations, fear of positive evaluation was associated with greater increases in positive emotions in the immersed condition, but lower increases in the distanced condition. Findings suggest that social anxiety led to diminished reminiscence benefits through different mechanisms, which differentially interact with savouring strategies to influence positive emotions.

  PublisherDOI

• Transitioning to college: Testing cognitive bias modification for interpretations as an inoculation tool for social anxiety in college first-years

  Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry · 2024-03-11 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Distressed drinking: The moderating impact of distress tolerance on the relation between anxiety sensitivity, panic symptoms, and alcohol use and problems

  Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs · 2023-08-30 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  OBJECTIVE: Undergraduate students are at particular risk for greater alcohol use, which is linked to anxiety disorders among a variety of other negative consequences. Understanding transdiagnostic factors underlying alcohol use problems and other disorders, such as anxiety and mood disorders, can help identify potential targets for intervention. METHOD: = 208 undergraduates; 76.9% female) tested relations between self-reported anxiety sensitivity, panic symptoms, alcohol use and problems, and two different measures of distress tolerance. Specifically, the distress tolerance measures assessed (a) perceived ability to handle negative emotion states (emotional distress tolerance), measured via self-report, and (b) behavioral ability to tolerate discomforting physical sensations (physical distress tolerance), measured via a breath-holding duration task. RESULTS: Consistent with expectations, anxiety sensitivity was associated with greater panic symptoms, which in turn was associated with greater alcohol use problems, for individuals with low but not high levels of physical distress tolerance. Contrary to expectations, there was no evidence that panic symptoms explained the relation between anxiety sensitivity and alcohol use and problems at either low or high levels of emotional distress tolerance. CONCLUSIONS: Taken together, these results suggest that a possible target to decrease alcohol use problems is to increase capacity to withstand or engage with discomforting physiological and panic sensations (i.e., to cultivate greater physical distress tolerance).

  PublisherDOI

• Anxiety sensitivity and panic symptoms: the moderating influence of distress tolerance

  Anxiety Stress & Coping · 2022-11-21 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author

  BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Anxiety sensitivity (AS) is the fear of consequences of anxiety-related sensations, and has been linked to the development of panic symptoms. Distress tolerance (DT) encompasses one's behavioral or self-perceived ability to handle aversive states. We examined whether higher DT buffers the relationship between AS and changes in panic symptoms across two timepoints, spaced ∼three weeks apart. DESIGN AND METHODS: At Time 1, 208 participants completed questionnaires and a physical DT task (breath-holding duration), a cognitive DT task (anagram persistence), and a self-report measure of DT (perceived DT). Panic symptoms were assessed at both timepoints. Structural equation modeling was used to evaluate two models in which AS and DT predicted changes in panic. RESULTS: Contrary to hypotheses, for those with longer breath-holding duration (higher physical DT), higher fears of physical anxiety-related sensations (higher physical AS) were associated with worse panic outcomes over time. CONCLUSIONS: Findings suggest that those with lower physical DT may have been less willing to engage with difficult tasks in the short-term. Although disengagement in the short-term may provide temporary relief, it is possible that averse psychopathological consequences stemming from rigid or habitual avoidance of distressing states may develop over longer periods of time.

  PublisherDOI

• A Randomized Test of Interpretation Bias Modification for Perfectionism Versus Guided Visualization Relaxation Among High Perfectionistic Undergraduate Students

  Behavior Therapy · 2022 · 2 citations

  • Psychology
  • Clinical psychology
  • Psychiatry
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Evaluating Mechanisms: Mapping Weekly Dynamics between Experiential Avoidance and SAD Symptoms

  Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment · 2021-06-25 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract Widely-used, empirically-supported treatments focus on reducing experiential avoidance (EA) as a mechanism of social anxiety disorder (SAD) symptom change. However, little is known about how EA and SAD symptoms bidirectionally interrelate from session to session, or throughout the course of an intervention—a gap that raises significant theoretical and clinical questions about the mechanistic role of EA. Participants ( N = 78) with elevated EA and SAD symptoms completed a 3-session pilot intervention (Approach-Avoidance Task training plus psychoeducation) designed to target EA. Bivariate latent change score modeling was then used to map the bidirectional, temporal interrelationships between EA and SAD symptoms from session to session. Analyses accounted for the overall trajectory of change in both variables (i.e., EA and SAD) and both variables’ preceding measurement. Findings suggested that changes in SAD symptoms preceded and predicted changes in EA from session to session. Contrary to hypotheses, this effect was not bidirectional, as changes in EA did not precede and predict changes in SAD symptoms from session to session. The use of a relatively small analogue sample limit the external validity of the present findings. Nevertheless, these novel findings advance our understanding of the dynamic interrelationships between EA and SAD symptoms throughout treatment. Moreover, given that many leading treatments target EA, this study highlights a need for future work to continue evaluating whether EA is indeed a mechanism of SAD symptom change.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Impact of Peer and Family Functioning on Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children’s Mental Health

  Journal of Child and Family Studies · 2020 · 36 citations

  • Psychology
  • Developmental psychology
  • Clinical psychology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Moving Beyond the Negative

  The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease · 2020 · 7 citations

  • Psychology

  Individuals with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) report poorer quality of life (QOL) than do nonanxious controls. Further, although positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) have been shown to predict QOL, no previous literature has tested this relationship in the context of individuals with GAD. In the present study, we evaluated the unique and interactive contributions of PA and NA on QOL within a sample of individuals diagnosed with GAD (N = 50). Specifically, a hierarchical regression was conducted to evaluate the unique contributions of PA, NA, and their interaction on QOL, over and above symptoms of depression. PA and depression symptoms were both significant predictors of QOL, whereas neither the main effect for NA nor the PA × NA interaction was statistically significant. Results suggest that, for those with GAD, PA uniquely contributes to QOL. Strategies to upregulate PA may be a useful treatment target for increasing QOL in individuals with GAD.

  PublisherDOI

• Implicit Cognition and Psychopathology: Looking Back and Looking Forward

  Annual Review of Clinical Psychology · 2019-01-11 · 48 citations

  review

  Implicit cognitive processing is theorized to have a central role in many forms of psychopathology. In the current review, we focus on implicit associations, by which we mean evaluative representations in memory that are difficult to control and do not require conscious reflection to influence affect, cognition, or behavior. We consider definitional and measurement challenges before examining recent empirical evidence for these associations in anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, posttraumatic stress, depressive, and alcohol use disorders. This examination is framed by a brief review of the ways that prominent models of psychopathology represent biased implicit processing of disorder-relevant information. We consider to what extent models reflect more traditional automatic/implicit versus strategic/explicit dual-process perspectives or reflect more recent dynamical systems perspectives in which mental representations are iteratively reprocessed, evolving continuously. Finally, we consider the future research needed to better understand the interactive and temporal dynamics of implicit cognition in psychopathology.

  PublisherDOI

• Perfectly imperfect: The use of cognitive bias modification to reduce perfectionism

  Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry · 2019-04-09 · 17 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant F31MH083337

  NIH · $23k · 2009

• NIH Grant R21AA021151

  NIH · $368k · 2016

Frequent coauthors

• Bethany A. Teachman

  26 shared

• April R. Smith

  Auburn University

  9 shared

• Sarah Dreyer-Oren

  8 shared

• Meghan W. Cody

  W. G. (Bill) Hefner VA Medical Center

  8 shared

• E. Marie Parsons

  8 shared

• Courtney Beard

  McLean Hospital

  8 shared

• Laurel D. Sarfan

  University of California, Berkeley

  7 shared

• Joshua C. Magee

  Behavior Therapy Associates

  7 shared

Labs

• Elise M. Clerkin LabPI