Megan Baumgardner

• Ph.D.
• Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins Medicine

This study examined associations among children’s anxiety, interpretation bias, and anticipated distress before and after cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and investigated baseline levels of interpretation bias and anticipated distress as well as changes in these cognitive biases following treatment as predictors of treatment outcome. Clinically...

Extant research highlights the importance of early paternal engagement for children and families. Thus, there is strong support for the exploration of predictors of low-income father engagement. Informed by Belsky’s process model of parenting, this study explores contextual determinants of father–infant engagement (i.e., verbal engagement, physical...

Patterns of parenting behaviors tend to persist across generations, but less is known about the associations between mothers’ perceived histories of parenting and their current parenting attitudes. The present study examined stress and depression as potential mechanisms through which mothers’ perceived histories of maternal and paternal support and...

Prior research supports the learnability of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition Alternative Model of Personality Disorders (AMPD). However, researchers have yet to compare novice ratings on the AMPD’s Level of Personality Functioning Scale and the 25 pathological personality traits with expert ratings. Furthermore...

This study investigated the role of perceived parental psychological control and warmth in college students’ friendship quality and use of relational aggression with peers. College students (N = 237) completed self-report measures assessing their relational aggression, friendship quality, and parents’ perceived use of psychological control and warm...

Previous research has assessed ways that parenting behaviors, such as warmth and control, uniquely predict young adult internalizing symptoms; however, profiles of parenting incorporating multiple dimensions in tandem may more accurately characterize these behaviors and how they affect young adult well-being. This study aimed to identify profiles o...

Positive and negative interpretation biases have been conceptualized as distinct constructs related to anxiety and social anxiety, but the field lacks psychometrically sound self-report measures to assess positive and negative interpretations of social ambiguity. This study examined the psychometric properties of the Ambiguous Social Scenarios Ques...

Multiple theoretical frameworks have been proposed to provide a more comprehensive picture of the risk factors that influence anxiety-related developmental trajectories. Nonetheless, there remains a need for an integrative model that outlines: (1) which risk factors may be most pertinent at different points in development, and (2) how parenting may...

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is an evidence-based treatment for social anxiety disorder that has been found to elicit significant changes in process-based mechanisms (e.g., emotion regulation strategies), which subsequently lead to reductions in social anxiety and associated functional impairment; however, CBT may be less effective for social...

Economically marginalized families may face enduring vulnerabilities that make adaptive relational processes leading to healthy, long-term relationships more difficult. Informed by the vulnerability-stress-adaptation framework, we utilized an actor-partner interdependence model and dyadic data from a sample of 199 low-income couples who were expect...

Objective The purpose of this study was to examine changes in relationship quality and couple conflict in low‐income parents. Background When welcoming a new child, couples often report increased conflict and a decline in relationship quality. However, some scholars maintain couples can transition to parenthood with few negative effects. Low‐incom...

Youth anxiety is associated with elevated feelings of distress in the face of ambiguity and the tendency to interpret ambiguous situations as threatening. Although interpretation bias and anticipated distress have been implicated in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety, less is known about how these information processing biases are associated w...

Although "fat talk" is associated with increased eating disorder risk, the predictors of fat talk engagement and viable alternatives to these pervasive conversations remain unclear. The current experiment examined responses to fat talk versus feminist-oriented challenging fat talk scenarios. Undergraduate women (N=283) completed baseline questionna...