PEOPLE
Lab Director
BENJAMIN N. JOHNSON, PH.D.
Assistant Professor
My interests lie in better understanding individuals affected by personality disorders, improving our assessment of non-suicidal self-harm, suicide, and other behaviors often linked to personality disorders, and providing individualized treatment recommendations and integrative treatment approaches derived from both behavioral and psychodynamic traditions.
I am also interested in the role of trauma in the development of personality disorders as well as in the similarities and differences between chronic physical pain and mental pain and the role of self-harm in pain and emotion regulation.
I endeavor to ground my research in improving clinical care for individuals with personality disorders or related difficulties. I also have a love of data analysis and incorporate various forms of latent variable modeling into my research.
I received my PhD from Penn State University, completed my predoctoral internship at Mount Sinai Beth Israel, and am an assistant professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, NJ.
Doctoral Students
4th Year Doctoral Student
ALEXANDRA STEIN
Alex is in her third year of the Clinical Psychology PhD program at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Binghamton University in 2017. She then worked for two years as a Research Coordinator in the Clinic for Aging, Anxiety, and Mood Disorders at Columbia University Medical Center. She is passionate about contributing to a deeper understanding of personality disorders, specifically borderline personality disorder (BPD), and serves as president of the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorders Student Section. Her current research is focused on bridging the gap between scientific understanding and lived experience of individuals with BPD.
Volunteers
CAITLIN KRAUSE
3rd Year Doctoral Student
Caitlin is in her second year of the Clinical Psychology Ph.D. program at Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU). She received her B.A. in Psychology from the University of St. Andrews in 2019, and she received her M.A. in Forensic Psychology from FDU in 2021. Alongside volunteering in the TAPP lab, Caitlin is a member of Dr. Georgia Winters’ Sexual Grooming Lab at FDU. She is interested in combining clinical and forensic research to better understand and treat mental health in a myriad of populations, from those incarcerated to those receiving inpatient or outpatient mental health services. Her current research focuses on the relationship between victims’ disclosure of child sexual abuse (i.e., if they disclosed and how those they disclosed to responded to them) and borderline symptomology. Her other research interests/projects include sexual grooming amongst clergy members, paraphilic disorders, and online sexual offending.
Collaborators
Kenneth N. Levy, Ph.D.
Lindsey McKernan, Ph.D.
Yogev Kivity, Ph.D.
Lauren M. Lipner, Ph.D.