Mara Mather - Career

Career

Mather is best known for her contributions to research on emotion and memory. Her work with Laura Carstensen and Susan Charles revealed a positivity effect in older adults’ attention 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 a new arousal-biased competition (ABC) theory that they argue can account for a disparate array of emotional memory effects, including some effects that initially appear contradictory (e.g., emotion-induced retrograde amnesia vs. emotion-induced retrograde enhancement). ABC theory 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 theory 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.