Beyond the Blind Spot: Bias, Burnout, and Forensic Psychology at The Purpose Center with Kariss Cone

Hello! My name is Kariss Cone, and I am a senior from Nashville, Tennessee, double-majoring in Psychology and Sociology with a minor in Social and Economic Justice. This semester, I’ve had the privilege of working as a Clinical Psychology Intern at The Purpose Center @ KKJ Forensic and Psychological Services in Durham.

My interest in psychology comes from both intellectual curiosity in the human brain and behavior, and from personal experience. From navigating my own mental health struggles to taking AP Psychology in high school, I became fascinated with why people act, think, and feel the way they do, and how systems either support or fail them in the process.

I originally wanted to be a therapist, but once I arrived at an R1 institution like UNC, I quickly fell in love with research. Still, I wasn’t sure which direction to take. Psychology’s breadth is one of its greatest strengths as a discipline, but it can also make charting a career path or honing in on a research interest feel overwhelming.

My sophomore year, I joined the Center for Environmental Medicine, Asthma, and Lung Biology (CEMALB), and the experience clarified two things: one, I loved research, and two, biological research was not for me. Finding out what you do not want to do is just as valuable as discovering what you do want to do. Around the same time, I was taking a race and ethnicity course in the sociology department, where I read Linda Villarosa’s “Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives.” Learning that Black women in the U.S. die from pregnancy-related causes at a rate 3 to 3.5 times higher than white women was both alarming and galvanizing. I realized that maternal health outcomes are shaped by systemic forces that extend far beyond individual factors, and I wanted to study exactly that. This is when I decided to add my sociology major, and the combination of my majors has shaped everything I've pursued since.

This shift led me to the Family Matters Study (FMS) through the Carolina Population Center, where I work as a research assistant under Dr. Lisa Pearce. Through this role, I’ve written a senior honors thesis examining racial and ethnic differences in prenatal worry, combining my interests in quantitative methods, health disparities, and advocacy.

I also served as Dr. Karen Gil's Undergraduate Learning Assistant (ULA) for her Health Psychology course, which was one of the most formative experiences of my undergraduate career. Developing and independently teaching two classes, assisting with every lesson, and supporting students individually during office hours confirmed that I want teaching to be part of my future, alongside research.

But one question lingered: did I want to pursue clinical or social psychology? Clinical psychology spans research, teaching, and practice, and practice was the one domain I hadn't yet explored. The Gil Internship gave me the chance to find out.

Since beginning my internship at The Purpose Center, I've been immersed in both the clinical and forensic arms of the practice. On the clinical side, working with my mentor Dr. Katrina Kuzyszyn-Jones, I've researched and developed presentations on burnout, validated assessment measures, and the mental health challenges of legal careers, including work-life balance for law students and attorneys. These projects illuminated a real gap between what the psychological literature shows and what professional populations actually know about their own well-being.

On the forensic side, I'm assisting Dr. Julianne Ludlam in researching racial bias in psychological evaluations. I've been reading and coding past assessments across 32 variables — including demographic information, ACEs, and diagnostic severity — to identify potential disparities based on race, gender, and other sociodemographic factors. What's struck me most is how this work forces evaluators to reckon with something researchers call the "bias blind spot": the tendency to recognize bias in others far more readily than in ourselves (Gowensmith and McCallum, 2019). It's a fascinating and uncomfortable truth, and I believe this kind of internal audit should be standard practice across the field. I'm currently working with my mentors to develop this into an externally publishable project, and I'm excited to see what we find.

I've also been writing an article on juveniles being tried as adults for KKJ's forensic blog, and I've had the privilege of observing weekly co-parenting group sessions facilitated by Michelle Chasen. Watching her navigate real, complex family dynamics and then creating a post-hoc group survey to capture participants' experiences has been one of the most unique parts of this internship.

The Karen M. Gil Internship has not only answered my lingering question but has given me the confidence and clarity to pursue social psychology, where I can follow the research and systemic questions that have always fascinated me most. After graduating, I plan to pursue a post-bacc research position before obtaining a PhD in social psychology.I am so grateful to Dr. Kuzyszyn-Jones, Dr. Ludlam, and everyone at The Purpose Center for their mentorship and generosity throughout this semester. I'd also like to thank Dr. Steven Buzinski and Richie Gray for making this opportunity possible and for their ongoing support. This internship has been a true highlight of my time at UNC.