Eleanor Junkins

I am a postdoctoral trainee funded by the NIMH T32 Training Program in Emotion Research working with Dr. Kate Walsh, a clinical psychology. For two years prior, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies working with Drs. Brian Ogolsky and Jen Hardesty. I earned my PhD in psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign working with Dr. Jaime Derringer.

I am a personality psychologist interested in personality, close relationships, and mental health. My research seeks to represent and address generalizability to underrepresented groups, primarily focusing on sexual and gender diversity and diverse relationship structures. My work contributes to research questions such as: 1) What are mechanisms that impact or help sustain a satisfying, high-quality romantic relationship and buffer against relationship violence? 2) How does socioecological/sociocultural context influence variation in psychosocial processes? 3) Who do we include in research? How can we measure identities and context to be more inclusive and clear on limits of generality? As norms and identities shift over time, I believe it is vital both for theorizing and applied research that our scientific knowledge reflects diverse lived experiences and explains the contexts under which specific psychological outcomes will unfold, and to that end my work aims to contribute.