Mara Mather Wins 2010 APA Distinguished Scientific Award

With another prestigious honor under her belt, Dr. Mather's professional star continues to rise
By Jonathan Riggs

     Dr. Mara Mather won a 2010 American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award, among the highest honors for scientific achievement by psychologists.
     Dr. Mather’s win came in the category of Distinguished Early Career Scientific Contribution to Psychology, which recognizes outstanding psychologists who are in the first 10 years since receiving their doctorates.
     Her research delves into the connections and interactions of emotion, cognition and aging, and the APA singled out her “analytic grasp of complex theoretical issues and empirical findings, deep scholarship, insightful and integrative ideas, creative methodology, and lucid prose.”
     Dr. Mather’s continued professional success comes as no surprise to those familiar with the USC Davis School of Gerontology, where this Associate Professor of Gerontology and Psychology has not only earned an increasingly impressive collection of awards, but has built up a thriving research lab and a roster of dedicated students.

How did it feel to win this award?
It is an amazing honor. The list of previous recipients is quite impressive.

How has the USC Davis School been as a base of operations for you?
It’s a terrific place for me and my lab members to conduct our research. The interdisciplinary group of faculty are an amazing resource, with expertise on aging that spans from the societal to the cell level. In general, I have been struck by the openness of the faculty at USC to cross traditional disciplinary boundaries to create new collaborative ventures. I have never been on another campus where people interact with their colleagues from different primary disciplines as much.

Is there a particular reason why?
One of the hubs bringing together different researchers is the Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center here on campus. One current focus of my lab's research is understanding the brain mechanisms underlying emotion and cognition and so we have been conducting functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies at the center. I have been impressed by the helpfulness of the other faculty and staff involved and by how well the center is run.

What excites you about your research?
I love the mental challenge of making sense of puzzling or surprising findings. It requires insight, creativity and logic to generate new hypotheses and ways to test these hypotheses. It also requires an open mind and some detective work to notice and ultimately understand findings that don't fit current wisdom in the field.

What are some of the things you have found in your lab?
Older adults show a positivity effect in attention and memory, being more likely than younger adults to ignore or forget negative compared with positive information; brief episodes of stress increase learning about positive outcomes and decrease learning about negative outcomes; minor changes in experiment procedure can make arousing stimuli enhance or impair memory. I'm excited about the ideas we have to explain the underlying mechanisms of these effects and hope they will help us understand some of the fundamental principles of how emotion affects memory and other cognitive processes. 

Where do you see your research taking you in the next 10 years?
I will be investigating how emotion and stress influence memory and other cognitive processes, with a focus on how these emotion-cognition interactions change as people age.