Join the Lab

labpic

Prospective Graduate Students

Dr. Benoit Allen intends to review applicants to the Clinical Child Psychology Program (CCPP) at KU for the upcoming admissions cycle (Fall 2025). That being said, admissions to our program is done as a cohort, so applications will be reviewed by multiple faculty members. Please note that she does not accept graduate students through KU’s clinical psychology program, which is separate from the CCPP.

Dr. Benoit Allen is unable to meet individually with potential applicants but has put together additional lab information that may be helpful. Areas of interest within the lab are listed below. Potential applicants should have interests that align with one or more of the following in some clear way.

  • Etiology of child anxiety, especially as it pertains to parenting styles and behaviors, emotion socialization, cognitive-affective processing of potential threat, parental ability to tolerate child negative affect, and/or emotion regulation 
  • Intergenerational transmission of anxiety
  • Event-related potentials (ERPs) and mobile eye tracking assessment
  • Ecological momentary assessment and digital interventions for youth anxiety
  • Computerized cognitive bias modification (CBM) for the prevention and treatment of youth anxiety

We also want to give you a sense of current and future projects in the lab. We are currently analyzing pilot data from an EMA study with anxious mothers which assesses their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors during stressful interactions with their children. These will inform a grant application to be submitted early next year. We are also gearing up to collect pilot data on two ERP tasks with anxious mothers and their children. One will assess the N400 in response to emotionally ambiguous scenarios and serve as an index of interpretation bias. The other will assess the LPP in response to socially ambiguous scenes and serve as an index of emotional reactivity/emotion regulation. These data will inform a future grant submission aimed at better understanding maternal cognitive-affective processing of child potential threat (assessed via ERP, mobile eye tracking, and EMA). A final future grant submission will be focused on refining dosing for a parent-focused CBM intervention intended to prevent youth anxiety. Additionally, we have access to several datasets with variables relevant to these topics from which my students frequently publish.

 

If you wish to see a copy of Dr. Benoit Allen’s mentoring statement, please contact her at kristyballen@ku.edu.

Prospective Research Assistants​

We are not currently accepting applications for RAs.Those interested in research assistant positions can reach out to the Psychology Advising Office for potential research opportunities in other research labs in the department.