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 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, biomarker indicators of stress, as well as coping with the COVID-19 pandemic. 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 and integrity of and functional activity in emotion regulation-related brain circuitry, psychophysiological measures of emotional responses, and these measures' relation to aging, stress, cognition, coping, biomarkers of health as well as biological and psychological predictors of well-being.

Recent Publications