Psychology 130: Clinical Psychology

About The Professor

Ann M. Kring's broad interests are in emotion and psychopathology. Specific interests include the emotional features of schizophrenia, assessing negative symptoms in schizophrenia, and the linkage between cognition and emotion in schizophrenia. In addition, Dr. Kring studies emotion in healthy individuals, with a focus on individual differences in expressive behavior, gender differences in emotion, and the linkages between cognition, personality, social context, and emotion.

Dr. Kring and her research group have been studying the nature of emotion disturbance in schizophrenia, observing a couple of emotional disconnections in this population. First, people with schizophrenia show less observable facial expression despite reporting equally intense amounts of experienced emotion compared to people without schizophrenia. Second, people with schizophrenia score higher than people without schizophrenia on clinical measures of anhedonia, indicating a reduction in the experience of pleasure, yet they report experiencing comparable amounts of pleasant emotions in daily life and in the presence of pleasant stimuli. A primary focus of her research program has been to uncover the mechanisms driving these emotion disconnections in schizophrenia. Ongoing studies are designed to assess the nature of anhedonia in schizophrenia, examining anticipatory pleasure (i.e., pleasure in anticipation of future events as well as the ability to predict whether future events will be pleasurable), consummatory pleasure (i.e., pleasure in the moment), and memory for pleasurable events. Other studies are examining emotional responding among women with schizophrenia, an area that has not been well investigated.