Veronica Cole

Assistant Professor of Psychology

Wake Forest University

Biography

Welcome to my academic website! Here you can learn a bit about my research and teaching. I work with students at the undergraduate and graduate levels to study novel ways of measuring human experiences across the life course, an effort we call the Measurement Across Development (MAD) Lab.

My collaborative research focuses on the application of latent variable models to the measurement of psychopathology and health risk behaviors in adolescence and early adulthood. As a quantitative psychologist, I generally do statistical analyses on pre-existing datasets in order to help untangle the complex set of factors which drive people toward and away from healthy behaviors across development.

Interests

Measurement Invariance
Latent Variable Models
Developmental Psychopathology

Education

PhD in Quantitative Psychology, 2017
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
MA in Quantitative Psychology, 2014
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
BA in Psychology, 2009
Wellesley College

Recent Publications

Exploring stress, cognitive, and affective mechanisms of the relationship between interpersonal trauma and opioid misuse

Jessica Roberts Williams, Veronica Cole, Susan Girdler, Martha Grace Cromeens

Psychosocial functioning among college students who misuse stimulants versus other drugs

Veronica T Cole, Andrea M Hussong

Simplifying the assessment of measurement invariance over multiple background variables: Using regularized moderated nonlinear factor analysis to detect differential item functioning

Daniel J Bauer, William CM Belzak, Veronica T Cole

Social network isolation mediates associations between risky symptoms and substance use in the high school transition

Andrea M Hussong, Susan T Ennett, Daniel M McNeish, Veronica T Cole, Nisha C Gottfredson, W Andrew Rothenberg, Robert W Faris

A Latent Variable Approach to Measuring Social Dynamics in Adolescence

Veronica T Cole, Andrea M Hussong, Robert W Faris, William A Rothenberg, Nisha C Gottfredson, Susan T Ennett

See all publications

Projects

Social Position and Health Risk in Adolescence

How does an adolescent’s position among their peers affect their risk of substance use? Our collaborative team including graduate and undergraduate students is conducting a systematic review to synthesize the current evidence about this question.

Retrospection and Self-Report in Longitudinal Studies

When we ask subjects about past their behavior, what period of time should we ask them to recall? If we ask an adolescent about their depressive symptoms in the past week, we will obviously get different information than if we asked about the past year.