ABOUT US

Our lab focuses on understanding how the diagnosis of a chronic illness affects individuals and couples. Specifically, we are interested in investigating psychosocial factors that are salient to illness adjustment, which include intimate relationship dynamics, coping strategies, psychological distress, informational needs, and health perceptions. Understanding these constructs is important for the development of interventions and resources to improve quality of life, symptom management, and psychological adaption for chronically-ill individuals and/or their partners.

We are currently conducting research on the impact of cancer (i.e., colorectal and breast), as well as other chronic illnesses and inherited cancer suceptiblity conditions, such as multiple sclerosis and Lynch syndrome (i.e., hereditary non-polyposis colorectal cancer).

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Lab Director

Tae Hart, PhD

tae.hart@torontomu.ca
416-979-5000 ext. 554247

I received my B.A. in psychology from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. I completed an APA-approved clinical internship at the Palo Alto Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center, followed by a National Institute of Mental Health research postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford University. After working for four years as a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, I moved to Toronto in 2007 to join the Department of Psychology at Toronto Metropolitan University. In addition to my position at Toronto Metropolitan University, I hold a research appointment at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute at St. Michael’s Hospital. Much of my research is conducted at the Zane Cohen Centre for Digestive Diseases at Mount Sinai Hospital, where I also hold a scientific research staff appointment.

My research centers on psychological factors associated with adjustment to illness in chronically-ill individuals. Primarily, my work has investigated quality of life, psychological distress, and symptom burden in patients who have been diagnosed with cancer, multiple sclerosis, or gastrointestinal disorders.

At the current time, my lab is in the process of analyzing data from several completed studies. Past research projects have been funded by the U.S. National Institute of Health, CIHR, Canadian MS Scientific Research Foundation, Canadian Breast Cancer Research Alliance, and the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

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Kaitlin McGarragle

Kaitlin joined the Psychosocial Medicine Lab in 2017 as the Lab Manager and began her MA in clinical psychology in 2020. Her research interests include psychosocial wellbeing, symptom management, and health behaviours in cancer survivors and other individuals living with chronic health conditions, as well as eating disorders. Kaitlin’s master’s thesis was a qualitative project exploring dyadic coping congruence in couples coping with multiple sclerosis. Kaitlin’s doctoral dissertation focuses on negative and positive affect in relation to the experience of binge eating.

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