Nim Tottenham | |
---|---|
Occupation | Professor of Psychology |
Awards | APA Award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology (2015) |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | Barnard College University of Minnesota |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Columbia University |
Nim Tottenham is a professor of psychology at Columbia University,where she leads the Developmental Affective Neuroscience Laboratory. [1] Her research highlighted fundamental changes in amygdala-prefrontal cortex circuitry across childhood and adolescence and the influential role of early experiences on the developmental trajectories of these circuits. [1]
Tottenham received the National Academy of Sciences Troland Research Award in 2020 [2] for "her innovative discoveries of critical windows of affective development during childhood and adolescence,their underlying neural basis at the circuit level and their disruption following early life stress." [3] She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and of the Society for Experimental Psychologists. [4] Her scientific contributions in developmental neuroscience have also been recognized by the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology (2015), [5] the Flux Award [6] (2022),and the American Psychosomatic Society [7] (2020).
Tottenham attended the Hopkins School,a private school in New Haven,Connecticut. Her teachers at Hopkins championed her to partake in laboratory experiences at nearby Yale University. At Yale,she learned about genetic signaling in drosophila in Spyros Artavanis-Tsakonas' lab and the role of neuropeptides in parental cognitions of their newborns in James Leckman's lab. [8] She attended Barnard College,where she majored in Psychology and earned her B.A. in 1996. Following her graduation,she worked as a research assistant in the laboratory of Mary Jane Rotheram-Borus. She helped examine the development of children and adolescents in New York City whose parents were living with or had died from HIV-related illness. Working on these projects influenced her interest in early life experiences on emotional development. [1] [8]
She attended graduate school at the University of Minnesota and obtained a joint Ph.D. in Child Psychology and Neuroscience in 2005,under the supervision of Charles Nelson and Megan Gunnar. Chuck and Tottenham developed a face emotion stimulus set that is still widely used by colleagues. Her dissertation was titled The Development of Face Perception &Facial Expression Processing:Childhood to Young Adulthood. [9] She also spent one summer training at the University of Pittsburgh. Here she was introduced to the study of psychopathology during the adolescent period under the mentorship of Ron Dahl. [8]
Tottenham received postdoctoral training under the supervision of B.J. Casey from the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell Medical College in 2006. Casey was renowned for her work in developmental cognitive neuroscience and for performing fMRI studies on cognitive development in young children. She was invited by Casey to collaborate on a research project examining brain development following early parental deprivation. The duo continues to work on a regular basis. [8]
During her time as an assistant professor at the University of California,Los Angeles Psychology Department in 2010,Tottenham received a National Institute of Mental Health Biobehavioral Research Award for Innovative New Scientists (BRAINS) [10] [11] [12] to examine developmental change in amygdala-prefrontal cortex circuitry under normal conditions as well as following early adversity.
In 2017,Tottenham was selected to be the featured presenter for the Irene Jakob Memorial Lecture series,which was established at the University of Pittsburgh in honor of the late Irene Jakab,a psychiatrist and humanist who had achieved prominence for her use of art therapy in the diagnosis and treatment of learning disabilities and mental illness. [13]
Tottenham studies the critical windows that affect how the brain develops. [1] [14] Her lab at Columbia uses various methods to understand the development of neural circuits that dictate behavior through childhood and adolescence and the effects of early-life caregiving and stress have on brain development. [15] [16] Tottenham found that children who spent extended amounts of time in institutionalized care developed an abnormal frontolimbic circuitry,both functionally and structurally,which reduced their ability to maintain eye contact and caused anxiety symptoms. [6] [17] [18]
One of her most cited works includes The NimStim set of facial expressions:Judgments from untrained research participants. [19] The NimStim Set of facial Expressions is a broad dataset comprising 672 images of unnaturally posed photographs by 43 professional actors. It is widely known in the literature,especially in the field of working memory,self-regulation,and even in the treatment of clinical disorders such as schizophrenia.
She is currently exploring the longitudinal development of the amygdala and its cortical connections,the impact of early life stress on brain development,and how children learn to respond to emotional or frustrating events from their parents. [17] [12]
The amygdala is one of two almond-shaped clusters of nuclei located deep and medially within the temporal lobes of the brain's cerebrum in complex vertebrates,including humans. Shown to perform a primary role in the processing of memory,decision making,and emotional responses,the amygdalae are considered part of the limbic system. The term "amygdala" was first introduced by Karl Friedrich Burdach in 1822.
Pavlovian fear conditioning is a behavioral paradigm in which organisms learn to predict aversive events. It is a form of learning in which an aversive stimulus is associated with a particular neutral context or neutral stimulus,resulting in the expression of fear responses to the originally neutral stimulus or context. This can be done by pairing the neutral stimulus with an aversive stimulus. Eventually,the neutral stimulus alone can elicit the state of fear. In the vocabulary of classical conditioning,the neutral stimulus or context is the "conditional stimulus" (CS),the aversive stimulus is the "unconditional stimulus" (US),and the fear is the "conditional response" (CR).
Developmental cognitive neuroscience is an interdisciplinary scientific field devoted to understanding psychological processes and their neurological bases in the developing organism. It examines how the mind changes as children grow up,interrelations between that and how the brain is changing,and environmental and biological influences on the developing mind and brain.
Paradoxical laughter is an exaggerated expression of humour which is unwarranted by external events. It may be uncontrollable laughter which may be recognised as inappropriate by the person involved. It is associated with altered mental states or mental illness,such as mania,hypomania or schizophrenia,and can have other causes.
Gary Berntson is an emeritus professor at Ohio State University with appointments in the departments of psychology,psychiatry and pediatrics. He is an expert in psychophysiology,neuroscience,biological psychology,and with his colleague John Cacioppo,a founding father of social neuroscience. His research attempts to elucidate the functional organization of brain mechanisms underlying behavioral and affective processes,with a special emphasis on social cognition.
Geraldine Dawson is an American child clinical psychologist,specializing in autism. She has conducted research on early detection,brain development,and treatment of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and collaborated on studies of genetic risk factors in autism. Dawson is William Cleland Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and professor of psychology and neuroscience,former director,Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and director of the Duke Center for Autism and Brain Development at Duke University Medical Center. Dawson was president of the International Society for Autism Research,a scientific and professional organization devoted to advancing knowledge about autism spectrum disorders. From 2008 to 2013,Dawson was research professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was chief science officer for Autism Speaks. Dawson also held the position of adjunct professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and is professor emerita of psychology at University of Washington. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Society,American Psychological Association,International Society for Autism Research,and the Society of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology.
Emotion perception refers to the capacities and abilities of recognizing and identifying emotions in others,in addition to biological and physiological processes involved. Emotions are typically viewed as having three components:subjective experience,physical changes,and cognitive appraisal;emotion perception is the ability to make accurate decisions about another's subjective experience by interpreting their physical changes through sensory systems responsible for converting these observed changes into mental representations. The ability to perceive emotion is believed to be both innate and subject to environmental influence and is also a critical component in social interactions. How emotion is experienced and interpreted depends on how it is perceived. Likewise,how emotion is perceived is dependent on past experiences and interpretations. Emotion can be accurately perceived in humans. Emotions can be perceived visually,audibly,through smell and also through bodily sensations and this process is believed to be different from the perception of non-emotional material.
Essi Maria Viding FBA FMedSci is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at University College London in the Faculty of Brain Sciences,where she co-directs the Developmental Risk and Resilience Unit,and an associate of King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry,Psychology and Neuroscience. Viding's research focuses on development of disruptive behaviour disorders,as well as children and young people's mental health problems more broadly. She uses cognitive experimental measures,brain imaging and genetically informative study designs in her work.
Jee Hyun Kim is an Australian behavioral neuroscientist whose work focuses on emotional learning and memory during childhood and adolescence. She is an associate professor,principal research fellow,and head of the Molecular Psychiatry Laboratory at the Deakin University School of Medicine,Australia
Frances A. Champagne is a Canadian psychologist and University Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin known for her research in the fields of molecular neuroscience,maternal behavior,and epigenetics. Research in the Champagne lab explores the developmental plasticity that occurs in response to environmental experiences. She is known for her work on the epigenetic transmission of maternal behavior. Frances Champagne's research has revealed how natural variations in maternal behavior can shape the behavioral development of offspring through epigenetic changes in gene expression in a brain region specific manner. She won the NIH Director's New Innovator Award in 2007 and the Frank A. Beach Young Investigator Award in Behavioral Neuroendocrinology in 2009. She has been described as the "bee's knees of neuroscience". She serves on the Committee on Fostering Healthy Mental,Emotional,and Behavioral Development Among Children and Youth in the United States.
Elizabeth Anya Phelps is the Pershing Square Professor of Human Neuroscience at Harvard University in the Department of Psychology. She is a cognitive neuroscientist known for her research at the intersection of memory,learning,and emotion. She was the recipient of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society Distinguished Scholar Award and the 21st Century Scientist Award from the James S. McDonnell Foundation,as well as other honors and awards in her field. Phelps was honored with the 2018 Thomas William Salmon Lecture and Medal in Psychiatry at the New York Academy of Medicine. She received the 2019 William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science (APS) which acknowledged how her "multidisciplinary body of research has probed the influence of emotion across cognitive and behavioral domains using novel imaging techniques and neuropsychological studies grounded in animal models of learning."
The dual systems model,also known as the maturational imbalance model,is a theory arising from developmental cognitive neuroscience which posits that increased risk-taking during adolescence is a result of a combination of heightened reward sensitivity and immature impulse control. In other words,the appreciation for the benefits arising from the success of an endeavor is heightened,but the appreciation of the risks of failure lags behind.
Adriana Galván is an American psychologist and expert on adolescent brain development. She is a professor of psychology at the University of California,Los Angeles (UCLA) where she directs the Developmental Neuroscience laboratory. She was appointed the Jeffrey Wenzel Term Chair in Behavioral Neuroscience and the Dean of Undergraduate Education at UCLA.
Deanna Marie Barch is an American psychologist. She is a chair and professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences and the Gregory B. Couch Professor of Psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research includes disorders such as schizophrenia,depression,cognitive and language deficits. She also focuses on behavioral,pharmacological,and neuroimaging studies with normal and clinical populations. Barch is a deputy editor at Biological Psychiatry. She previously served as editor-in-chief of Cognitive,Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience.
Catherine Hartley is an American psychologist and an Associate Professor of Psychology within the Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science at New York University in New York City. Hartley's research explores how brain development impacts the evaluation of negative experiences,decision-making,and motivated behavior. Her work has helped to elucidate how uncontrollable aversive events affect fear learning and how learning to control aversive stimuli can improve emotional resilience.
Uraina Simone Clark is an American neuroscientist and Director of the Neuropsychology and Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research makes use of functional magnetic resonance imaging to understand how stressors impact brain and behaviour. She has studied the impact of discrimination on brain function,and shown that social discrimination results in an increase in amygdala function.
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