In this installment of Faculty-Student Co-Authors we feature collaborative work and a publication by Psychology graduate student Katie Granier and her faculty mentor Dr. Dan Segal.
Katie Granier is a second-year clinical psychology M.A. student in Dr. Segal’s Aging and Mental Health Lab within the Geropsychology concentration. Her primary research interests are in anxiety and worry in older adults, aging and mental health, and protective and risk factors for cognitive decline in late life. At UCCS, she is currently completing a Master’s thesis on the multifaceted characterization of worry in relation to anxiety in older adults. She is also participating in clinical practicum at the UCCS Aging Center providing individual psychotherapy and memory clinic services to older adults in the Colorado Springs community. Katie is currently planning to graduate with her M.A. from UCCS in May 2020 and pursue doctoral studies in the 2020-2021 academic year.
Dr. Dan Segal started his professional career at UCCS in 1995 in the Psychology Department, after earning his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Miami. At UCCS, he directs the Aging and Mental Health Lab, where he and his team of graduate students are committed to studying mental health problems among older adults. In particular, he and his students have focused on the assessment of psychopathology among older adults (especially anxiety assessment), suicide resilience and aging, barriers to mental health services, and the expression and impact of personality disorders across the lifespan. Dr. Segal is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America and of the American Psychological Association (Division 20).
The Geriatric Anxiety Scale (GAS; Segal et al. 2010) is a 30-item self-report measure designed to assess, screen, and quantify severity of anxiety symptoms among older adults. The GAS was developed due to the lack of a brief anxiety measures designed specifically for use with older adults and was constructed based on the three symptom domains of anxiety often assessed in late life—somatic, cognitive, and affective. The GAS has become an increasingly popular and widely used measure of anxiety which has a wealth of psychometric data supporting its use in diverse community, medical, and clinical samples. Dr. Segal and the Aging and Mental Health Lab, including Marissa Pifer, Katie Granier, and Lisa Stone, have recently published a new resource in the Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging summarizing the development, use, applications, and psychometric properties of the GAS (Segal, Granier, Pifer, & Stone, 2019).
Segal, D. L., Granier, K. L., Pifer, M., & Stone, L. E. (2019). Geriatric anxiety scale. In Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging. Basingstoke, United Kingdom: Springer Nature. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_1103-1
Segal, D. L., June, A., Payne, M., Coolidge, F. L., & Yochim, B. (2010). Development and initial validation of a self-report assessment tool for anxiety among older adults: The Geriatric Anxiety Scale. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 24, 709-714. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2010.05.002
Written and submitted by Katie Granier ([email protected]) and Dan Segal ([email protected]).
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