Recent A&S Grad Wins 2024 National Distinguished Dissertation Award

Mathematical tools that help social scientists understand the factors that influence how human behavior changes over time are effective at accommodating a small number of variables; however, a recent graduate of UVA’s Ph. D. program in psychology envisioned a new way to explore the complexities of those behaviors that incorporates a greater number of variables. Her dissertation on the subject earned her the Distinguished Dissertation Award from the Council of Graduate Schools, an international organization focused on improving and advancing graduate education.

Katharine Daniel, who earned her doctoral degree in clinical psychology from UVA last year, received the prestigious 2024 award in social sciences for her dissertation, Problems with Switching: Investigating the Sequence of Emotion Regulation Strategy Choices in the Daily Lives of Socially Anxious People. The work uses advanced quantitative methods to explore questions about emotion regulation in daily life, focusing on how anxious individuals make use of a wide range of emotion regulation strategies over time.    She also explored the question of why some people use strategies that only reinforce their anxiety.

Traditional psychological research often focuses on understanding the effects for the average person, which can overlook unique and situation-dependent effects. Daniel’s dissertation builds on conventional methods by developing new methods to analyze data that are specific to individuals and the context of their anxiety. Her work has the potential to offer new insights into where emotion regulations efforts go awry for people with anxiety disorders, which can inform personalized treatment recommendations.

Daniel’s interest in the subject arose from her frustration over the limitations of the statistical tools available to her as a researcher.

“We have a lot of theory in clinical psychology that underlies how important it is to be able to switch from one emotion regulation strategy to another over time as situational demands change, and yet our ways to measure those dynamics haven’t been developed to capture some of the important aspects of what the data are telling us,” Daniel said.    “What I needed to be able to do is to move toward actually testing some of the theories that I found really interesting and that underlie mental health and wellbeing, so I wanted to develop a new way to capture and make use of those data.”

Working with a variety of collaborators, including UVA’s Steve Boker, a professor of quantitative psychology; Bobby Moulder, a graduate colleague interested in quantitative methods; professor Bethany Teachman, director of clinical training at UVA; and collaborators in engineering and computer science at the University, Daniel developed the methodology for quantifying patterns in how people switch between behaviors over time in a way that can accommodate a significantly higher number of variables than conventional methods.

Daniel, whose work was also supported by a Dean’s Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, a Jefferson Scholars Foundation Fellowship and an International P.E.O. Scholar award, said the project was an ambitious one, but she credits the supportive and collaborative nature of the UVA community with making the work possible.    

“Dr. Daniel’s remarkable achievement highlights the transformative power of cross-disciplinary collaboration and innovative thinking in advancing knowledge,” said Christa Acampora, Buckner W. Clay Professor of Philosophy and dean of Arts & Sciences. “Her work not only underscores the importance of addressing complex human challenges, such as anxiety, but also demonstrates the impact of groundbreaking research originating in Arts & Sciences. We are deeply proud to see our graduate programs attracting and producing scholars whose contributions have impacts far beyond UVA.”

Now an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences with the UVA School of Medicine, Daniel believes that the methodology could also be useful for researchers in other fields.

“What’s exciting about this work is that because it’s so methodologically focused, the method itself has a wide variety of applications not just in mental health but in physical health, sociology and other fields that are interested in how behaviors change over time,” Daniel said.

Brent Gunnoe, interim associate dean of graduate education and Commonwealth professor of chemistry, said, “Dr. Daniel’s graduate work is a showcase for the type of impactful and cutting-edge research that results from recruiting talented and motivated graduate students to UVA. And, this is just one example of Dr. Daniel’s broad and positive impact on our educational and research programs.”

Phillip Trella, associate vice provost, and director of the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs at UVA said, “We are absolutely thrilled that this award recognizes Dr. Daniel’s outstanding achievement. In her dissertation, Dr. Daniel combines a novel quantitative methodological approach with real-world application that has the potential to not only lead to better clinical outcomes for those with anxiety, but also to impact future research in the field.”