Natasha A Tonge
Natasha A Tonge
Assistant Professor
minority mental health disparities; trust; self-disclosure; anxiety; patient-provider interactions in adults; AI/ML in mental healthcare
Dr. Natasha Tonge IS accepting applications in Fall 2024 for Fall 2025.
Dr. Natasha Tonge received her B.A from Swarthmore College where she graduated with a special major in Biopsychology and a minor in Art History. She received her M.A. and PhD from Washington University in St. Louis. She completed clinical internship at the Minneapolis VA and Postdoctoral Fellowship at the VISN 5 MIRECC in Baltimore, Maryland.
Dr. Tonge's current research is focused on trust/mistrust in patient-provider relationships, specifically for mental health service delivery and in healthcare contexts. She is interested in
1) how can mistrust and fear of negative evaluation in patient-provider relationships be assessed when discussing patient mental health?
2) how is trust in the patient-provider relationship influenced by context - whether that be the type of treatment delivery (e.g., mHealth, telehealth, face-to-face) or type of provider relationship (e.g., nursing, physician, social worker, psychologist)?
3) how and what do people self-disclose about their mental health within personal relationships, professional relationships or even over social media?
Understanding how those with minoritized and/or stigmatized identities (e.g., racial/ethnic minorities, sexual/gender minorities, serious mental illness) experience trust and make decisions about self-disclosure within different types of interpersonal relationships is central to her research program. Her lab typically using quantitative methods to study what is going on that include surveys, quasi-experiments, advanced statistical models, and AI/ML/NLP.
Selected Publications
Tonge, N. A., Miller, J. P., Kharasch, E. D., Lenze, E. J., & Rodebaugh, T. L. (2024). An investigation of the potential clinical utility of critical slowing down as an early warning sign for recurrence of depression. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 82, 101922.
Tonge, N.A., Travaglini LE, Brown CH, Muralidharan A, Goldberg RW. Impact of mental health on seeking pain care among veterans with serious mental illness. General Hospital Psychiatry. 2021 Jul 27:S0163-8343(21)00107-9. doi: 10.1016/j.genhosppsych.2021.07.008.
Tonge, N.A., Lim, M.H., Piccirillo, M.L., Fernandez, K.C., Langer, J.K., & Rodebaugh, T.L. Interpersonal problems in social anxiety disorder across relational contexts. (2020). Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 102275.
Expanded Publication List
Education
B.A. Swarthmore College, 2011
M.A. Washington University in St. Louis, 2016
Ph.D. Washington University in St. Louis, 2020