Mara Mather

Mara Mather is a professor of gerontology and psychology at the USC Davis School of Gerontology. Her research deals with aging and affective neuroscience, focusing on how emotion and stress affect memory and decisions.[1][2]

Career

Mather is best known for her contributions to research on emotion and memory.[3] Her work with Laura Carstensen and Susan Charles revealed a positivity effect in older adults’ attention and memory, in which older adults favor positive information more and negative information less in their attention and memory than younger adults do. Perhaps the most intuitive explanation for this effect is that it is related to some sort of age-related decline in neural processes that detect and encode negative information. However, her research indicates that this is not the case; her findings suggest that older adults’ positivity effect is the result of strategic processes that help maintain well-being.[4]

She has also been investigating how emotional arousal shapes memory. Mather and her graduate student Matthew Sutherland outlined an arousal-biased competition (ABC) model that they argue can account for a disparate array of emotional memory effects, including some effects that initially appear contradictory (e.g., emotion-induced retrograde amnesia vs. emotion-induced retrograde enhancement). ABC model posits that arousal leads to both "winner-take-more" and "loser-take-less" effects in memory by biasing competition to enhance high priority information and suppress low priority information. Priority is determined by both bottom-up salience and top-down goal relevance. Previous theories fail to account for the broad array of selective emotional memory effects in the literature, and so the ABC model fills a key theoretical hole in the field of emotional memory.[5]

Mather's research projects have included work on how older adults interpret positive stimuli[6] as well as how stress influences older adults' decision making processes[7] and the differences between men and women's decision-making processes under stress.[8]

Honors

Selected publications

References

  1. "Mara Mather, Ph.D.". University of Southern California.
  2. Gewin, Virginia. "Careers Q&A: Mara Mather". Nature. Retrieved 21 March 2012.
  3. Szalavitz, Maia (5 March 2012). "Decision-Making Under Stress: The Brain Remembers Rewards, Forgets Punishments". TIME. Retrieved 21 March 2012.
  4. "Emotional Fitness in Aging: Older is Happier". American Psychological Association. Retrieved 21 March 2012.
  5. Mather, Mara; Sutherland, Matthew (February 2012). "The selective effects of emotional arousal on memory". American Psychological Association. Retrieved 2015-10-24.
  6. "Research lifts veil on 'the good old days'". ABC News Online. 2006-07-19.
  7. Haas, J.G. (2008-12-01). "Stress makes older people more conservative". Orange County Register.
  8. Wickelgren, Ingrid. "Under Threat, Women Bond, Men Withdraw". Scientific American. Retrieved 21 March 2012.

External links

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