Suzanne King is a Professor of Psychiatry at McGill University and has been a Lead Investigator in the Psychosocial Research Division at the Douglas Institute Research Centre since 1991. Her prior work on schizophrenia investigated the associations between the course of schizophrenia and family attitudes toward the patient (expressed emotions).

More recently, Project EnviroGen has been investigating the means by which risk factors for schizophrenia, including genetics, prenatal stress, obstetric complications, childhood trauma and teenage cannabis use, influence the appearance of symptoms among schizophrenic individuals and in "healthy" control populations. Using a local natural disaster to prospectively examine the effects of prenatal stress, Dr. King and her team followed over 150 women who had been pregnant during the 1998 ice storm and their children.

Project Icestorm showed that the severity of maternal stress and the trimester of the pregnancy at the time of exposure explain the variance in the children's cognitive, behavioural and physical development. The effects of exposure to prenatal maternal stress were still present among children at age 11 ½.

A second study on prenatal maternal stress, the Iowa Flood Study, attempted to replicate Project Icestorm by following 300 women who had experienced flooding in June 2008, including a cohort of women whose risk factors and psychosocial functioning had been assessed before the disaster, making this the first pre- and post-trauma study of pregnant women.

Lastly, the QF2011 Queensland Flood Study includes pre-flood psychosocial data, a randomized control group using two birth support practices by a midwife, and biological samples from the births collected from nearly 300 Australian women. Dr. King is attempting to integrate the findings of her prospective and retrospective studies in a neurodevelopmental model of severe mental illness.

I essentially try to better understand the links between affect regulation and psychopathology, mainly by studying mental functioning (mentalization, alexithymia). Part of my work bears on the theoretical analysis of these themes, using a mainly psychoanalytical approach that integrates elements of theories of emotion. I also conduct empirical research using a number of methodological strategies: discourse analysis (quantitative and qualitative), creation and use of questionnaires, experimental tasks, etc. I created a grid for verbal elaboration of affect (GÉVA), a verbal measurement of affect mentalization, a central part of many research projects.

Research themes:

• Mentalization and affect regulation
• Exploration of forms of alexithymia
• Study of affect mentalization in psychopathology, particularly depression and borderline personality disorder
• Analysis of the role of sadness and positive emotions in mentalization
• Assessment and treatment of mental functioning

My research lies at the crossroads of health psychology and clinical psychology.

In my current work, two lines of research can be distinguished. First, I am trying to identify the psychological repercussions of disease, taking account of the central aspects of quality of life and adjustment to the illness.

I am interested in measuring and detecting the emotional distress and psychopathological repercussions of disease. This modelling and the subsequent measurement are an essential step leading to psychological intervention. Second, I study relations between patients and caregivers, through concepts like empathetic understanding. I am trying to define and measure clinical empathy, to understand the factors promoting and inhibiting empathy, and to assess the health effects of clinical empathy.

In particular, I am developing research in the field of cancer and psychosocial oncology, taking account of the impact of and adjustment to illness for the individual, couples and family. Accordingly, my work concerns both child and adult psychology.

My work is based on a constant back and forth between research and practice, so as to ask clinically relevant research questions and to enrich clinical activity with new data.

My laboratory is based at the CHU Sainte-Justine research centre, where I am responsible for the quality of life theme of the Centre of Excellence in Immunology-Hematology-Oncology. This team also welcomes doctoral candidates, post-doctoral fellows, and MSc and honours thesis students.