Research Overview
Professor Starr will be accepting applications for graduate students for the 2025-2026 academic year.
Dr. Starr's research centers on the origins and consequences of depression and anxiety disorders in adolescence and adulthood. These interests have developed along several interrelated pathways.
First, her work examines interpersonal and other environmental variables (e.g., stress) as causes, correlates, and consequences of depression and anxiety. Although the term "internalizing" was coined within psychopathology research to describe symptoms and disorders directed inward or toward the self, abundant research suggests that internalizing disorders also markedly impact the social environment, through the deterioration of close relationships, adaptation of interpersonally destructive behaviors, self-generation of stressors, and a range of other mechanisms. Dr. Starr's research explores processes by which depression and anxiety reciprocally influence interpersonal functioning.
A central question of Dr. Starr's research is shy some individuals are susceptible to depression than others following stressful experiences, while others are resilient. Although her lab addresses this question from a variety of different angles, she is especially interested in how genetic risk interfaces with stress exposure to predict depression and other key outcomes.
Dr. Starr has a longstanding methodological interest in applying intensive longitudinal designs (daily diary studies, ecological momentary assessment, etc.) to study psychopathological processes. She has used these approaches to examine interpersonal functioning, symptom presentation, affective reactivity, emotion regulation, and basic emotional dynamics in relation to depression and anxiety.
Finally, Dr. Starr has had a longstanding interest in the causes and implications of the extensive comorbidity between depression and anxiety disorders, including delineating their natural boundaries, identifying shared and unique features, and exploring etiologic relationships between symptoms.