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Tracy A. Dennis-Tiwary | |
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Born | Sayre, Pennsylvania, U.S. | January 11, 1973
Alma mater | University of Rochester Pennsylvania State University |
Spouse | Vivek J. Tiwary |
Children | 2 |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Clinical psychology |
Institutions | Hunter College City University of New York |
Website | https://www.drtracyphd.com |
Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (born January 11, 1973) is an American clinical psychologist, author, health technology entrepreneur, and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. Her research explores emotion regulation and its role in mental health and illness, with a particular focus on anxiety and anxiety-related attention biases, as well as child emotional development. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]
Dennis-Tiwary is an early pioneer and researcher in the field of gamified digital therapeutics, including attention bias modification and gamified mobile applications for the remediation of anxiety, stress, substance abuse, and other mental and behavioral health problems. [6] [7] [8]
Dennis-Tiwary was born in Sayre, Pennsylvania. After being admitted to the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester as a performance major (oboe), she shifted her focus of study to graduate summa cum laude with her B.A. in psychology in 1995, where she studied approach and avoidance motivation with Andrew Elliot and child maltreatment with Dante Cicchetti at the Mt. Hope Family Center. She received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Pennsylvania State University in 2001, where she specialized in the study of emotion regulation, parent-child interactions, and the cross-cultural context of emotional development and adjustment. From 2002 to 2004 she completed her postdoctoral training in intervention science at the Institute for Risk at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. [9] [10] [11]
Since 2004, Dennis-Tiwary has worked as a professor in the Department of Psychology at Hunter College of the City University of New York, where she also serves as the co-executive director of the Center for Health Technology, and as a member of the graduate faculty in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience as well as health psychology and clinical science at The Graduate School of the City University of New York. [12]
In 2019, she co-founded and serves as chief science officer for the digital therapeutics company Arcade Therapeutics, where the mission is to use breakthrough science to develop therapeutic mobile games that improve mental health, with a focus on anxiety- and stress-related disorders, addiction, major depressive disorder, and combinations with brain stimulation. [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] Her work in digital therapeutics, including her role as co-founder of Arcade Therapeutics (formerly Wise Therapeutics), was the front cover story of the November 2021 issue of StartUp HealthMagazine.
In May 2022, she published the book Future Tense: Why Anxiety Is Good For You (Even Though It Feels Bad) with HarperWave, a division of HarperCollins. [19] Central to the book is a critique of the medical model of mental illness, focusing on anxiety as a prime case in point, arguing that a disease approach to anxiety fails to distinguish between normal and pathological forms of emotional suffering, and inadvertently contributes to societal increases in mental health problems.
Dennis-Tiwary founded the Emotion Regulation Lab at Hunter College, where she examines biological, psychological, and social factors in the development of emotion regulation across the lifespan, its implications for mental health and illness (with a focus on anxiety and teen risk for suicide), and neurocognitive processes underlying novel treatment approaches (like attention bias modification) for anxiety, stress, addiction, and other behavioral health problems. [20]
In addition to Dennis-Tiwary's notable theoretical and methodological work on emotion regulation, [21] she has advanced the identification of clinically relevant neural signatures for emotion regulatory capacities and vulnerabilities, such as EEG asymmetry and scalp-recorded event-related potentials (ERP). [22] [23] For example, Dennis-Tiwary and colleagues were the first to show that the late positive potential (LPP) varies with emotion regulation abilities in children as young as five years of age. [24] [25] She further showed that these ERPs are developmentally sensitive, and predict individual differences in emotion regulation behaviors and adjustment in children [26] [27] [28] and adults [23] and in cognitive control capacities. [29] [30]
Dennis-Tiwary has made novel contributions to the understanding of the anxiety-related attention bias—termed the threat bias—or selective and exaggerated attention to threat. This includes developing innovative neurocognitive [31] [32] [33] [34] and behavioral [35] [36] measurement approaches, documenting the contextual sensitivity of these measures and validating their predictive associations with treatment response and the severity of anxiety symptoms over time.
Dennis-Tiwary is also a leading researcher in the study of attention bias modification (ABM), a class of computerized cognitive training protocols that are designed to remediate attention biases underlying mental and behavioral health problems. Extending ABM to problems with alcohol consumption, Dennis-Tiwary and colleagues [37] found that ABM for alcohol-related attention biases reduced alcohol craving in problem drinkers after a single session. She created and clinically validated the first gamified mobile ABM app for reducing anxiety and stress called Personal Zen. [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] Personal Zen is regularly included in media round-ups of the field’s top anxiety-relieving mobile apps. [43] [44] [45] [46]
Dennis-Tiwary has examined the impact of social media on emotional functioning, including the development of a validated questionnaire, the Social Media and Communication Questionnaire (SMCQ). [47] [48] In other research, Dennis-Tiwary and colleagues at the Pennsylvania State University developed a novel modification of the classic Still Face paradigm to model and examine the impact of parental withdrawal via mobile devices. [49] Findings suggested that consistent parental withdrawal during mobile device use could have a negative social-emotional impact on developing children and the parent-child relationship. This study was recreated in 2019 for a network TV special report for ABC entitled, "ScreenTime: Diane Sawyer Reporting." [50]
Since 2017, Dennis-Tiwary has written the column “More Than a Feeling” for Psychology Today. [51] Her work was the subject of the 2013 documentary Changing Minds at Concord High [52] and she appeared in the 2021 documentary I Am Gen Z. [53] She has spoken and presented her research at the United Nations, [54] the National Institute of Mental Health, the New York Academy of Sciences, the Personal Democracy Forum, [55] and the Rubin Museum Brainwave Festival. [56]
Dennis-Tiwary has served on the editorial boards of Affective Neuroscience since 2019 [57] and the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology since 2017. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) as well as a member of the Society for Research in Child Development, the Society for Cognitive Neuroscience, the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, and the Anxiety and Depression Association of America.
Since 2020, Dennis-Tiwary has served as a research advisor for the Global Day of Unplugging [58] and the Hunter College Food Policy Center, [59] as well as a media consultant for ABC News and NBC/Universal from 2017 to 2021. She served as a consultant to the NYC Public School System from 2017 to 2019 and the New York Chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness in 2020. [60]
Anxiety is an emotion which is characterised by an unpleasant state of inner turmoil and includes feelings of dread over anticipated events. Anxiety is different from fear in that fear is defined as the emotional response to a present threat, whereas anxiety is the anticipation of a future one. It is often accompanied by nervous behavior such as pacing back and forth, somatic complaints, and rumination.
Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a psycho-social intervention that aims to reduce symptoms of various mental health conditions, primarily depression and anxiety disorders. Cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on challenging and changing cognitive distortions and their associated behaviors to improve emotional regulation and develop personal coping strategies that target solving current problems. Though it was originally designed to treat depression, its uses have been expanded to include many issues and the treatment of many mental health and other conditions, including anxiety, substance use disorders, marital problems, ADHD, and eating disorders. CBT includes a number of cognitive or behavioral psychotherapies that treat defined psychopathologies using evidence-based techniques and strategies.
A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, may dictate their behavior in the world. Thus, cognitive biases may sometimes lead to perceptual distortion, inaccurate judgment, illogical interpretation, and irrationality.
A mood swing is an extreme or sudden change of mood. Such changes can play a positive part in promoting problem solving and in producing flexible forward planning, or be disruptive. When mood swings are severe, they may be categorized as part of a mental illness, such as bipolar disorder, where erratic and disruptive mood swings are a defining feature.
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 within the field of affective neuroscience.
Emotional dysregulation is characterized by an inability flexibly to respond to and manage emotional states, resulting in intense and prolonged emotional reactions that deviate from social norms, given the nature of the environmental stimuli encountered. Such reactions not only deviate from accepted social norms but also surpass what is informally deemed appropriate or proportional to the encountered stimuli.
Emotional and behavioral disorders refer to a disability classification used in educational settings that allows educational institutions to provide special education and related services to students who have displayed poor social and/or academic progress.
The psychological and physiological effects of meditation have been studied. In recent years, studies of meditation have increasingly involved the use of modern instruments, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography, which are able to observe brain physiology and neural activity in living subjects, either during the act of meditation itself or before and after meditation. Correlations can thus be established between meditative practices and brain structure or function.
Social anxiety is the anxiety and fear specifically linked to being in social settings. Some categories of disorders associated with social anxiety include anxiety disorders, mood disorders, autism spectrum disorders, eating disorders, and substance use disorders. Individuals with higher levels of social anxiety often avert their gazes, show fewer facial expressions, and show difficulty with initiating and maintaining a conversation. Social anxiety commonly manifests itself in the teenage years and can be persistent throughout life; however, people who experience problems in their daily functioning for an extended period of time can develop social anxiety disorder. Trait social anxiety, the stable tendency to experience this anxiety, can be distinguished from state anxiety, the momentary response to a particular social stimulus. Half of the individuals with any social fears meet the criteria for social anxiety disorder. Age, culture, and gender impact the severity of this disorder. The function of social anxiety is to increase arousal and attention to social interactions, inhibit unwanted social behavior, and motivate preparation for future social situations.
The self-regulation of emotion or emotion regulation is the ability to respond to the ongoing demands of experience with the range of emotions in a manner that is socially tolerable and sufficiently flexible to permit spontaneous reactions as well as the ability to delay spontaneous reactions as needed. It can also be defined as extrinsic and intrinsic processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions. The self-regulation of emotion belongs to the broader set of emotion regulation processes, which includes both the regulation of one's own feelings and the regulation of other people's feelings.
Attentional retraining is the retraining of automatic attentional processes. The method of retraining varies but has typically employed computerized training programs. The term originally indicated retraining of attention to rehabilitate individuals after a brain injury who had neurological disorders of attention including hemineglect, perseveration, limited attention span, and even ADHD. However, in more recent research and clinical applications attentional retraining has also been applied as a type of cognitive bias modification. In this application, attentional retraining refers to the retraining of automatic attentional biases that have been observed in high levels of anxiety.
Cognitive bias modification (CBM) refers to procedures used in psychology that aim to directly change biases in cognitive processes, such as biased attention toward threat stimuli and biased interpretation of ambiguous stimuli as threatening. The procedures are designed to modify information processing via cognitive tasks that use basic learning principles and repeated practice to encourage a healthier thinking style in line with the training contingency.
Interpersonal emotion regulation is the process of changing the emotional experience of one's self or another person through social interaction. It encompasses both intrinsic emotion regulation, in which one attempts to alter their own feelings by recruiting social resources, as well as extrinsic emotion regulation, in which one deliberately attempts to alter the trajectory of other people's feelings.
Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) is a system of psychotherapy developed by Professor Paul Gilbert (OBE) that integrates techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy with concepts from evolutionary psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, Buddhist psychology, and neuroscience. According to Gilbert, "One of its key concerns is to use compassionate mind training to help people develop and work with experiences of inner warmth, safeness and soothing, via compassion and self-compassion."
Emotional approach coping is a psychological construct that involves the use of emotional processing and emotional expression in response to a stressful situation. As opposed to emotional avoidance, in which emotions are experienced as a negative, undesired reaction to a stressful situation, emotional approach coping involves the conscious use of emotional expression and processing to better deal with a stressful situation. The construct was developed to explain an inconsistency in the stress and coping literature: emotion-focused coping was associated with largely maladaptive outcomes while emotional processing and expression was demonstrated to be beneficial.
Emily A. Holmes is a clinical psychologist and neuroscientist known for her research on mental imagery in relation to psychological treatments for post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), bipolar disorder, and depression. Holmes is Professor at the department of Women's and Children's Health at Uppsala University. She also holds an appointment as Honorary Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Oxford.
Social emotional development represents a specific domain of child development. It is a gradual, integrative process through which children acquire the capacity to understand, experience, express, and manage emotions and to develop meaningful relationships with others. As such, social emotional development encompasses a large range of skills and constructs, including, but not limited to: self-awareness, joint attention, play, theory of mind, self-esteem, emotion regulation, friendships, and identity development.
Elaine Fox is a Professor of Psychology and Director of the Oxford Centre for Emotions and Affective Neuroscience (OCEAN) at the University of Oxford. Her research considers the science of emotion and what makes some people more resilient than others. As of 2019 Fox serves as the Mental Health Networks Impact and Engagement Coordinator for United Kingdom Research and Innovation.
Alison Darcy is a research psychologist and technologist. She is the Founder and President of Woebot Health, a company which provides digital therapeutics and behavioural health products.
Koraly Elisa Pérez-Edgar is a developmental psychologist who studies the temperament of young children and connections between temperament, anxiety disorders, and other forms of psychopathology. She is known for her studies of shy children who may develop behavioral inhibition or social anxiety.
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