Assistant Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences
**Not accepting graduate students for Fall 2026**
Clinical Science
The overarching goal of my research program is to use a transdiagnostic, multidimensional approach to identify cognitive and emotional phenotypes that increase risk for internalizing psychopathology and cognitive aging. I am currently investigating mechanisms related to internalizing psychopathology risk including affect dynamics, cognitive performance, and cognitive distortions in large web-based samples, using both experience sampling and natural language processing techniques.
Rutter, L. A. & Hamilton, L. J. (2026). Cognitive dispersion and depressive symptoms in aging: Distinct contributions to longitudinal decline. The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 81: 5.
Hamilton, L. J., Coleman, M. E., Sprecher, A., & Rutter, L. A. (2026). Dementia stigma in the United States: Variation by target gender, degree of impairment, and respondent characteristics. Alzheimer's & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring.
Rutter, L. A., Hamilton, L. J., Wilson, S., Krendl, A. C., & Perry, B. L. (2026). Sex modifies the relationship between depression and risk for dementia: implications for targeted prevention. World Psychiatry.
Rutter, L. A., ~iang, J., Bollen, J., Valdez, D., Edwards, A., Boyle, A.,… Lorenzo-Luaces, L. (2025). Digital technology use, physical activity, and internalizing symptoms in adolescence: Replication and extension in a post-pandemic cohort. International Journal of Adolescence and Youth, 30: 1. 2587284. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673843.2025.2587284
Fite, R. E., Thompson-Hollands, J., Buss, J. F., Lacy, L., Lorenzo-Luaces, L., & Rutter, L. A. (2025) Disorder-specific and transdiagnostic vulnerability to posttraumatic stress symptoms: A machine learning approach. Journal of Traumatic Stress. doi: 10.1002/jts.70020. PMID: 41211814.
Rutter, L. A., Edinger, A., Lorenzo-Luaces, L., ten Thij, & Bollen, J. (2025). Anxiety and depression are associated with more distorted thinking on social media: A longitudinal multi-method study. Cognitive Therapy and Research.
Howard, J., Lorenzo-Luaces, L., Lind, C., Lakhan, P., & Rutter, L. A. (2024). Is a criterion A Trauma necessary to elicit posttraumatic stress symptoms? Journal of Psychiatric Research, 170, 58-64. 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2023.12.008
Rutter, L. A., Howard, J., Lakhan, P., Valdez, D., Bollen, J., & Lorenzo-Luaces, L. (2023). “I haven’t been diagnosed, but I should be”: Insight into individuals’ self-diagnoses of common mental health disorders. JMIR Formative Research, 7. e39206. doi: 10.2196/39206.
Riley, T. N., Thompson, H., Howard, J., & Lorenzo-Luaces, L. Rutter, L. A., (2022). Seeking connectedness through social media use: Associations with adolescent empathic understanding and perspective-taking. Current Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-022-04096-6
Rutter, L. A., Lind, C., Howard, J., Lakhan, P., & Germine, L. (2022). Posttraumatic stress symptom severity is associated with impaired processing of emotional faces in a large international sample. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.22834
Bollen, J., ten Thij, M., Breithaupt, F., Barron, A. T., Rutter, L. A., Lorenzo-Luaces, L., & Sceffer, M. (2021). Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades. PNAS
Bathina, K. C., ten Thij, M., Lorenzo-Luaces, L., Rutter, L. A., & Bollen, J. (2021). Depressed individuals express more distorted thinking on social media. Nature Human Behavior, 5, 458-466. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01050-7
Rutter, L. A., Vahia, I. V., Forester, B. P., Ressler, K. J., & Germine, L. T. (2020). Heterogeneous indicators of cognitive performance and performance variability across the lifespan. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 12: 62. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2020.00062
Rutter, L. A., Norton, D. J., & Brown, T. A. (2020). The impact of self-reported depression severity and age on facial emotion recognition in outpatients with anxiety and mood disorders. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 42, 86-92.
Rutter, L. A., Dodell-Feder, D., Vahia, I. V., Forester, B. P., Ressler, K. J., Wilmer, J. B., & Germine, L. T. (2019). Emotion sensitivity across the lifespan: Mapping clinical risk periods to sensitivity to facial emotion intensity. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 148 (11), 1993-2005.
Rutter, L. A., Scheuer, L., Vahia, I. V., Forester, B. P., Smoller, J. W., & Germine, L. (2019). Emotion sensitivity and self-reported symptoms of GAD across the lifespan: A population-based sample approach. Brain and Behavior. e01282. doi: 10.1002/brb3.1282
Rutter, L. A., Norton, D. J., Brown, B., & Brown, T. A. (2019). A double-blind placebo controlled study of intranasal oxytocin’s effect on emotion recognition and visual attention. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 43, 523–534.
The College of Arts