Center for Healthy Minds | 625 W. Washington Ave., Madison, WI 53703-2637
Stacey M. Schaefer
Associate Scientist, Center for Healthy Minds
Stacey M. Schaefer is the principal investigator of a study examining how individual differences in emotion may play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s Disease. She is the co-principal investigator of a new large study examining how individual differences in the time course of emotional responses--called affective chronometry--are important for cognition, mental health, stress regulation, the immune system, and biomarker indicators of stress. In addition, she leads the Center's contribution to the Midlife in the United States Longitudinal Study of Health and Well-Being (the MIDUS Neuroscience Project) as well as a study examining how our cognitive abilities are related to our emotion regulatory abilities.
Schaefer's research questions can generally be summarized as: How do different emotional response styles shape our health and well-being as we age? How do emotional response styles change as people age? What does better emotion regulation ability predict in terms of people’s health and well-being? Similarly, what individual differences promote better emotion regulation and healthier emotional response styles? For example, what is the interaction/overlap between executive control, the immune system, stress responses, and self-regulatory processes such as emotion regulation? To answer these questions, she studies the morphometry of and functional activity in emotion regulation-related brain circuitry, psychophysiological measures of emotional responses, and these measures' relation to aging, stress, cognition, coping styles, biomarkers of health as well as biological and psychological predictors of well-being.
What does well-being mean to me?
"Going home."
Related Studies
Brief Trainings to Buffer Against Acute Stress Effects
Center scientists are evaluating and comparing the effectiveness of brief trainings to buffer against the negative effects that acute stress has on behavior and cognitive abilities.
Cognitive Control and the Regulation of Emotion, Attention and Pain
Are people who are better at controlling their attention, emotion or pain responses in a laboratory setting more successful at carrying that skill into daily life?
How do people experience emotions over a period of time and what does that say about their resilience and well-being?
Examining the Relationship Between Emotion and Preclinical Alzheimer’s Disease
Center for Healthy Minds researchers are examining how emotion may play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Midlife Development in the United States
Our scientists examine how individual differences in emotional reactivity and recovery to emotional stimuli, brain structure and patterns of brain activity are related to life experiences, personality, behavior, health and well-being across the adult lifespan in a large national longitudinal sample.