Mara Mather is a professor of

gerontology Gerontology ( ) is the study of the social, cultural, psychological, cognitive, and biological aspects of aging. The word was coined by Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov in 1903, from the Greek , ''geron'', "old man" and , ''-logia'', "study of". The fie ...

and

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...

at the

USC Davis School of Gerontology The USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology is one of the seventeen academic divisions of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, focusing in undergraduate and graduate programs in gerontology, History Founded in 1975, the Leon ...

. Her research deals with

aging Ageing ( BE) or aging ( AE) is the process of becoming older. The term refers mainly to humans, many other animals, and fungi, whereas for example, bacteria, perennial plants and some simple animals are potentially biologically immortal. In ...

and

affective neuroscience Affective neuroscience is the study of how the brain processes emotions. This field combines neuroscience with the psychological study of personality, emotion, and mood. The basis of emotions and what emotions are remains an issue of debate withi ...

, focusing on how

emotion Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is currently no scientific consensus on a definition. ...

and

stress Stress may refer to: Science and medicine * Stress (biology), an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition * Stress (linguistics), relative emphasis or prominence given to a syllable in a word, or to a word in a phrase ...

affect

memory Memory is the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action. If past events could not be remembered, ...

and decisions. She is the daughter of mathematician

John N. Mather John Norman Mather (June 9, 1942 – January 28, 2017) was a mathematician at Princeton University known for his work on singularity theory and Hamiltonian dynamics. He was descended from Atherton Mather (1663–1734), a cousin of Cotton Mathe ...

Career

Mather is best known for her contributions to research on emotion and

. Her work with Laura Carstensen and Susan Charles revealed a positivity effect in older adults’

attention Attention is the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether considered subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information. William James (1890) wrote that "Atte ...

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. 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 Emotion can have a powerful effect on humans and animals. Numerous studies have shown that the most vivid autobiographical memories tend to be of emotional events, which are likely to be recalled more often and with more clarity and detail than ...

effects, including some effects that initially appear contradictory (e.g., emotion-induced

retrograde amnesia In neurology, retrograde amnesia (RA) is a loss of memory-access to events that occurred or information that was learned in the past. It is caused by an injury or the onset of a disease. It tends to negatively affect episodic, autobiographical, ...

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

Honors

National Institute on Aging The National Institute on Aging (NIA) is a division of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), located in Bethesda, Maryland. The NIA itself is headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland. The NIA leads a broad scientific effort to understand the ...

K02 Career Development Award * Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology from the

American Psychological Association The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It ha ...

* Richard Kalish Innovative Publication Award from the Gerontological Society of America * Excellence in Teaching Award from the UC Santa Cruz Committee on Teaching * Springer Early Career Achievement Award in Research on Adult Development and Aging * Margret Baltes Dissertation Award in the Psychology of Aging from APA Division 20 * American Psychological Association Dissertation Research Award *

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

Graduate Fellowship *

Alexander von Humboldt Foundation The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (german: Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung) is a foundation established by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and funded by the Federal Foreign Office, the Federal Ministry of Education and Resear ...

Research Fellowship

Selected publications

* Mather, M. (2007). Emotional arousal and memory binding: An object-based framework. ''Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2'', 33-52. * Mather, M., Gorlick, M. A., & Lighthall, N.R. (2009). To brake or accelerate when the light turns yellow? Stress reduces older adults' risk taking in a driving game. ''Psychological Science, 20'', 174-176. * Mather, M., & Sutherland, M.R. (2011). Arousal-biased competition in perception and memory. ''Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6'', 114-133. * Nashiro, K., Sakaki, M., & Mather, M. (2011). Age differences in brain activity during emotion processing: Reflections of age-related decline or increased emotion regulation? ''Gerontology''. * Sakaki, M., Niki, K., & Mather, M. (2011). Updating existing emotional memories involves the frontopolar/orbitofrontal cortex in ways that acquiring new emotional memories does not. ''Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23'', 3498-3514. * Mather, M, & Lighthall, N.R. (in press). Both risk and reward are processed differently in decisions made under stress. ''Current Directions in Psychological Science''.

References

External links

University of Southern California Davis School of Gerontology
{{DEFAULTSORT:Mather, Mara American women psychologists American gerontologists American cognitive neuroscientists American women neuroscientists Memory researchers Women medical researchers University of Southern California faculty Princeton University alumni Stanford University alumni Living people Year of birth missing (living people) American women academics 21st-century American women scientists