Graduate

Craig Marker, Ph.D.

Craig Marker, Ph.D.

Clinical Assistant Professor
Director, Psychological Services Center
Rosalind Franklin University of Heath and Medicine, 2003

• About
• Curent Resecarch Projects and Interests
• Selected Publications

About

Craig D. Marker is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology. He received his clinical psychology doctoral degree from Rosalind Franklin University / The Chicago Medical School. He completed post-doctoral respecialization in quantitative methods at the University of Virginia. He then worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for the Study of Emotion and Attention at the University of Florida. His main areas of interest include cognitive, emotional, and information processing differences in anxiety disorders. In his work, he integrates a multitude of measures, including self-reports, cognitive tasks, psychophysiological measures, eye-tracking, and brain imaging. He also uses advanced statistical techniques to model the dynamics of change

Current Research Projects and Interests

1. Information Processing in Anxiety Disorders. This line of research attempts to investigate how information is processed in anxiety disorders. Peter J. Lang described 3 systems that need to be taken into account when studying anxiety: 1) verbal reports, 2) physiology, and 3) behaviors. We attempt to measure all three of these processes when investigating how people attend, interpret, and remember fearful stimuli. We use cognitive, social, and neuropsychological paradigms to study the anxiety process. For example, people with anxiety tend to have an attentional bias toward threatening cues (for someone with social anxiety his or her attention is drawn to judgmental faces). Future research will also focus on how to train these informational processing biases as a way to reduce symptoms. Our laboratories includes state-of-the-art psychophysiological equipment, as well as eye tracking equipment.
2. Modeling change in the therapeutic process. This line of research attempts to uncover mediators and moderators of therapeutic outcome. That is what affects the therapeutic outcome. Specifically, we are investigating how treatment alliance, therapist and client expectancies, homework compliance, and altruistic activities dynamically change with symptom reduction. That is, we are asking what enhances (or slows down) symptom reduction. We attempt to investigate this question by modeling trajectories of change in these different variables (using a statistical technique called bivariate latent difference score modeling).
3. Disgust. This line of research attempts to investigate the emotion of disgust. In this research, we are investigating how people attend to disgusting stimuli, how they behave and physiologically react to the looming of disgust, and how disgust relates to obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Selected Publications

Marker, C. D., Calamari, J.E., Woodard, J. L., & Riemann, B. C., (2006). Heterogeneity in Growth Curves of Procedural Memory in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Journal of Anxiety Disorders 20, 389-407.

Goldman, B., Mart, D., Calamari, J. C., Woodard, J. L., Chik, Messina, M. G., Pontarelli, N. K., Marker, C. D., Riemann, B. C., & Wiegartz, P. S. (2008). Implicit learning, thought-focused attention and obsessive-compulsive disorder: A replication and extension. Behaviour Research and Therapy. 46(1), 48-61

Marker, C. D., Carmin, C. N., & Ownby, R. (2008). Factor analysis of the Cardiac Anxiety Questionnaire. Depression and Anxiety. 25(10), 824-831.

Teachman, B. A., Marker, C. D., & Smith, S. (2008). Automatic associations and panic disorder: Trajectories of change over the course of treatment, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 76(6), 988-1002.

Marker, C. D., Cohen, G. E. (2009) Disgust and Its Disorder: Theory, Assessment and Treatment Implications. PsycCritiques 54 (15).

Kendall, P.C., Comer, J.S., Marker, C.D., Creed, T.A., Puliafico, A.C., Hughes, A.A., Martin, E.D., Suveg, C., & Hudson, J.L. (2009). In-session exposure tasks and therapeutic alliance across the treatment of childhood anxiety disorders. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 77(3), 517-525.

Shearer, M. C., & Marker, C. D. (2009, In-Press). The Use of the Number Needed to Treat (NNT) in Randomized Clinical Trials in Psychological Treatment. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice