Mallory Kisner

Mallory Kisner

Mallory Kisner

Graduate Research Assistant

Clinical Psychology

Mallory is a third-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. Prior to joining Mason Psychology, she worked as a IRTA fellow at the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), using fMRI to investigate neural pathways underlying differences in social and emotional processing in individuals with alcohol use disorder. She also has prior experience studying the impacts of a mindfulness-based emotion competence curriculum on children’s emotion development and executive functioning.

In her current work with the Youth Emotion Lab at GMU, Mallory studies interpersonal stressors that interact with emotion and reward systems to influence substance use behaviors across the lifespan. Her research involves the use of multiple methodologies, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), heart rate variability (HRV), and ecological momentary assessment (EMA) approaches. She hopes to use her research to inform targets of intervention for those with substance use disorders.