Lisa W. Coyne, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Psychology; Associate Director of Graduate Curriculum; Director, Early Childhood Clinical Practicum
B.S., University of Scranton (Psychology/English/Philosophy), M.A., Ph.D., University of Mississippi
Internship: Brown Medical School
Postdoctoral Fellowship: NIMH-funded T-32 Research Fellowship in the Pediatric Psychology at Rhode Island Hospital/Brown Medical School at the Pediatric Anxiety Research Clinic (PARC)

Specialty Areas

Parenting, childhood aggression, anxiety, and socioemotional development.

Members of the Parent and Child Acceptance & Mindfulness Research Lab (PCAM) are interested in exploring the role of experiential avoidance (EA) in parent-child interaction, and how this may contribute to the development of impaired parenting and child psychopathology.  Experiential avoidance may influence how parents manage their children’s behavior, how they model and coach emotion regulation strategies, and may well place them at risk of developing harsh, coercive, or psychologically controlling responses to their children’s affect and behavior. As such, understanding parent EA will ultimately help us better describe and influence the development of child psychopathology. Thus, we are conducting research in community samples of families with young children (aged 18 months to 6 years) whose parents are at risk for developing impaired parenting repertoires.  We hope that this pilot work will help guide the development of mindfulness-based behavioral parent training programs.   

We are also exploring parenting behaviors and parent-child interactional sequences during exposure sessions in a family-based cognitive-behavioral treatment for early childhood Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).  We believe that parent-child interactions impact OCD symptom presentation, homework compliance and ultimately, treatment outcomes.  At present, we are refining an acceptance and mindfulness-based treatment manual for early childhood OCD.  This project is a collaborative effort between PCAM and the Pediatric Anxiety Research Clinic (PARC) at Rhode Island Hospital/Brown Medical School.

Selected Publications

Freeman, J. B. Garcia, A. M., & Coyne, L. W., Compton, S. & Leonard, H. L.  (in press). A family-based cognitive-behavioral treatment for early childhood OCD: Preliminary findings. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Choate-Summers, M. L., Freeman, J. B., Garcia, A. M., Coyne, L. W., Przeworski, A., & Leonard, H. L. (in press). Clinical considerations when tailoring cognitive behavioral treatment for young children with obsessive compulsive disorder. Education and Treatment of Children.

Coyne, L. W., Ehrenreich, J.T. & Cheron, D. Assessment of Acceptance and Mindfulness Processes in Youth.  In L. Greco (Ed.) Acceptance and Mindfulness Interventions for Children, Adolescents, and Families. Invited chapter, in press.

Coyne, L. W., Miller, A. L., Low, C., Seifer, R. & Dickstein, S. (2006).  Mothers’ empathic understanding of their toddlers: Associations with maternal sensitivity and depression.  Journal of Child and Family Studies.

Coyne, L. W. & Wilson, K. G. (2004) Cognitive fusion in impaired parenting: An RFT analysis. International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy, 4(3), 469-486.