Anita Adams
Research Interests:
- Aging
- Health psychology
- Emotion and emotion regulation
- Personality trait and disorder development across the lifespan
- Adverse early life experiences
Research:
During my undergraduate research career, my research was involved in developmental psychology; specifically, I studied the impact of culture and parental emotion socialization on children's emotion understanding and development. I also studied emotion regulation, personality, and sleep behaviors in undergraduate student populations. During my post-baccalaureate experience, my research shifted to a more clinical focus, and I worked with older and middle adult and child populations with diagnoses such as dementia, hormonally-impacted depression (specifically, perimenopausal depression), and autism.
My current research is centered on how trait responses to emotion (e.g., how one's consistent style of coping develops into a personality trait) can impact or be impacted by adverse childhood experiences. More specifically, I am interested in how one's early life experiences can impact one's later emotional and health development into adulthood.
I am a fourth year student in Dr. Suzanne Segerstrom's lab and avidly enjoying mentoring undergraduate students who are interested in psychology, research, and the graduate school process. Please do not hesitate to reach out to me with questions about the lab and/or my research!
Publications:
Chentsova-Dutton Y., Leontyeva A., Halberstadt, A. G., & Adams, A. M. (2021). And they all lived unhappily ever after: Positive and negative emotions in American and Russian picture books. Emotion, 8, 1585-1598. doi: 10.1037/emo0001021.
Clasey, J. L., Adams, A. M., Geiger, P. J., Segerstrom, S. C., & Crofford, L. J. (2020). Estimation of cardiorespiratory fitness without exercise testing: Cross-validation in midlife and older women. Women's Health Reports, 1, 584-591.
Selected Presentations:
Adams, A., Smith, G. T., Widiger, T. A., & Segerstrom, S. C. (2021, February). Multidimensional structure and demographic correlates of trait responses to emotion. Poster presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology virtual conference.
Adams, A., Smith, G. T., Widiger, T. A., & Segerstrom, S. C. (2020, December). Demographic correlates of trait responses to emotion. Poster presented at the American Psychosomatic Society virtual conference.
Adams, A., Smith, G. T., Widiger, T. A., & Segerstrom, S. C. (2020, March). Response to emotional experience: A multidimensional scaling study in diverse adults. Poster presentation to be given at "Achieving Health Equity: Opportunities for Psychosomatic Medicine" the 78th Annual Meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society, Long Beach, CA. Conference cancelled.
Leontyeva, A., Chentsova-Dutton, Y., Halberstadt, A., & Adams, A. (2019, March). Are emotions costly in a harsh world? Poster presented at preconference session at the Society for Affective Science, Boston, MA.