Dr. Tone (formerly McClure) was born in New Haven, Connecticut, but grew up in Atlanta. Her winding path to her current career began at Emory University, where she majored in English and German Literature. She joined the inaugural class of Teach for America after graduating and discovered, while teaching high school speech and drama in New Orleans, that she was fascinated with social behavior and anxiety. She went on to complete a master’s degree in school psychology at Trinity University in San Antonio and returned to Emory University in 1995 to complete her doctoral degree in clinical psychology under the mentorship of Dr. Steve Nowicki. Dr. Tone then spent 4 years as a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Daniel Pine at the National Institute of Mental Health, where she received the NIMH Richard J. Wyatt Memorial Fellowship Training Award for outstanding scientific achievement. She joined the GSU faculty, where she is currently a professor, in 2005 and served as the associate chair of the psychology department from 2014-2019. In January 2020, she became the department’s Director of Clinical Training.

Dr. Tone is a clinical psychologist with special interests in the ways in which emotional states, such as anxiety or depression, affect social behavior in both adults and children. Current research projects in the lab examine the ways in which anxious people behave in social situations and the cognitive, emotional, and neural processes that contribute to both their adaptive and their maladaptive interactions. Her research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and has served on study sections for the National Institutes of Health. In addition, Dr. Tone sits on the Editorial Boards of the journals Development and Psychopathology and Journal of Family Psychology and served from 2016-2020 as an Associate Editor for the journal Clinical Psychological Science. In 2018, GSU’s College of Arts and Sciences recognized her with its Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award, and in 2020, she received Georgia State University’s Alumni Distinguished Professor Award.