Miriam van Mersbergen, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, School of Communication Sciences and Disorders
About Miriam van Mersbergen
Miriam van Mersbergen is Assistant Professor in the School of Communicative Sciences and Disorders at the University of Memphis. Dr. van Mersbergen directs the Voice Emotion and Cognition Laboratory, which uses a multidimensional approach to investigate how emotional experience and cognitive factors influence vocalization and communication. She began her academic career studying music and communication arts at Calvin College. After a brief career in music she returned to academia and studied speech language pathology and vocology at The University of Iowa and continued with doctoral studies in speech language hearing sciences and psychology at the University of Minnesota. Dr. van Mersbergen is also an affiliate of the Institute for Intelligent Systems. Additionally, she has maintained an active clinical career specializing in performing voice users.
Research Interests
Dr. van Mersbergen research areas include psychological influences in voice production with an emphasis in emotional and cognitive processes. She uses psychometric, behavioral, and psychophysiological methods to investigate influences of affect and cognition on voice production. Some of the goals of her research are to gain a better understanding of typical emotional reaction to vocal errors (i.e., feedback errors) and to assess if those with certain types of voice disorders respond differently to those errors. In addition, she continues to develop clinical measures; specifically she investigates a way to measure voice effort that to be employed in voice clinics.