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Stephanie Tolley-Schell
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B.A.
Department of Psychology |
Research Interests:
I describe myself as a developmental psychopathologist and a cognitive neuroscientist. I am trying to understand the development and situational determinants of social and emotional behaviors that impact the lives of individuals as well as those with whom they interact: courage, compassion, and altruism on the positive side; indifference and aggression on the other.
Many factors influence the behavior of an individual in a given context, but the processes of selective attention and emotion regulation are posited to have strong influences on "social cognition", which include perceiving and interpreting a social situation based on prior learning, and possibly implementing a response. For example, courageous/protective behaviors and care giving behaviors require one to notice another's need, and also take a decisive action to help despite the potential for harm to oneself or exposure to unpleasant stimuli (e.g. human waste, decay).
My
research to date as a graduate student comprises two main lines of
inquiry. First, I have studied children who have experienced a
range of physical abuse and/or neglect by caregivers, and are thus at
heightened risk for aggressively victimizing others and being socially
neglected or rejected by their peer group. We have been able to
identify neural and behavioral indicators of atypicalities in these
children's attention and memory for threatening as well as affiliative
social signals. Ultimately I would hope to identify how, and in
which subgroups of children, such deviations could lead to problematic
interpersonal relationships. Presently, I am studying whether
individual differences in "affective style" are associated with
particular patterns of selective attention and social information
processing in young adults. Although some variation in processes
of selective attention and emotion regulation reflects relatively
stable individual differences, there may be important determinants of
intra-individual variability that, once identified, could offer novel
inroads for intervention or remediation of socially significant
problems. For example, we are currently investigating the
influence of sleep restriction-- a state which allegedly characterizes
40% of Americans-- on aspects of selective attention (alerting,
orienting, scaling, and executive attention), and how these
attentional processes in turn mediate attention to emotional scenes
involving danger or suffering of others. I also have a growing
interest in the development and implementation of ethics codes to
facilitate helping behaviors by adults. My research incoporates
methods of cognitive and affective neuroscience with multiple levels of
analysis.
