| Jessica Shackman | |
|
Incoming Graduate
Class of 2002 in Clinical Psychology B. S. in Cell Biology & Biochemistry, Bucknell University |
|
|
University of Wisconsin Department of Psychology 1202 West Johnson St. Madison, WI 53706
Office: Brogden Psychology Building, Rm. 192
|
|
Child Emotion Research LabAdvisor: Seth D. Pollak, Ph.D.Lab Phone: (608) 262-6647 
|
|
Research Interests:I am interested in understanding the mechanisms through which early experience impacts social and emotional development, and increases vulnerability for psychopathology. My research incorporates methods of developmental cognitive neuroscience with behavioral and psychophysiological analysis to investigate the impact of early experience on the perceptual and cognitive processing of emotion. The broad goal of this work is to understand how plasticity in the development of cognitive processes may confer risk for maladaptation, and how learning from emotionally atypical environments can compromise children’s ability to flexibly attend to emotional stimuli and regulate their subsequent emotional and behavioral responses.Currently, I am studying how affective signals that are outside the current focus of attention (i.e., are task-irrelevant) impact the processing of goal-relevant information. This work is motivated by the notion that threat-related cues are strong competitors for attention, and the hypothesis that inefficient attentional filtering due to attentional capture by threat signals may interfere with goal-directed behavior in ways that are consequential for socio-emotional development. To this end, I am examining the interaction between bottom-up perceptual processes and top-down executive control of attention in response to threat cues in physically abused children, and ways in which individual differences in trait or temperamental measures of affect moderate these processes. |
|
|
|
