Mallory Kisner

Graduate Research Assistant

Clinical Psychology

Mallory is a fourth-year doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology program at George Mason University. She graduated from Colorado State University in 2019 with a B.S. in Psychology and Applied Statistics. Her undergraduate research explored effects of a mindfulness-based emotion competence curriculum on children's socioemotional development. Prior to joining Mason Psychology, she also worked as a IRTA fellow at the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), where she assisted with a randomized controlled trial of a real-time fMRI based neurofeedback intervention for individuals with alcohol use disorder (AUD).

Since joining the Youth Emotion Lab at GMU, Mallory has integrated her research interests in socioemotional development, substance use, and neuroimaging methods to study interpersonal stressors that interact with emotion and reward systems to influence substance use behaviors across the lifespan. Mallory's dissertation research, funded by a NRSA F31 award (1F31AA031881-01), uses ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to explore intensive longitudinal associations between stress, mindfulness, and alcohol craving and use in highly stressed mothers of adolescents. Mallory hopes to use research in this area to identify targets for novel substance-use interventions, including smartphone-based just-in-time interventions.

Selected Publications

Kisner, M. A., Gonçalves, S. F., Fuchs, A. M., Thompson, J. C., & Chaplin, T. M. (2024). Parental alcohol use predicts neural emotion reactivity and substance use intentions in early adolescence. Journal of Early Adolescence. https://doi.org/10.1177/02724316241273414

Fede, S.J., Kisner, M.A., Dean, S.F., Kerich, M., Roopchansingh, V., Diazgranados, N., & Momenan, R. (2023). Selecting an optimal real-time fMRI neurofeedback method for alcohol craving control training: A pilot study. Psychophysiology. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/psyp.14367

Kisner, M. A., Sussman, L., Manuweera, T., Grodin, E., & Momenan, R. (2021). Evaluating effects of sex and age on white matter microstructural alterations in alcohol use disorder: A diffusion tensor imaging study. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 45(9), 1790-1803. https://doi.org/10.1111/acer.14678