Holly Laws is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in the NIMH T32 / Yale University Psychiatry Department training program in psychosocial interventions research. Holly earned her BA from Wesleyan University in 2002, and received her MA in General Psychology from Hunter College, City University of New York, in 2007. She is a recent graduate of the Clinical Psychology Program at UMass Amherst, and completed her predoctoral internship at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University.

Under the mentorship of Dr. Aline Sayer, Dr. Laws became versed in multilevel modeling of dyadic and repeated measures data, in the service of researching how relationship processes influence mental health over time. She applied dyadic methodology to several studies of romantic relationships, in collaboration with Maureen Perry-Jenkins, Sally Powers, and Paula Pietromonaco. Holly has also collaborated with Michael Constantino on studies relating interpersonal processes to depression outcome. Her dissertation provided a framework for modeling attunement processes over time in two distinct samples. The first study applied this framework to the examination of newly married couples’ attunement of the stress biomarker cortisol. The second study tested whether attunement between therapists’ and patients’ alliance ratings related to psychotherapy outcome for chronically depressed patients. 

Sponsored by the Psychology Colloquium Series, College of Natural Sciences, Clinical Department of Psychology, Rudd Adoption Research Program, and Center for Research on Families at UMass Amherst.