Catherine Hartley facts for kids

Catherine Hartley is an American psychologist and a professor at New York University. She studies how our brains grow and change, and how this affects how we make choices, especially when things are tough. Her work has helped us understand how scary or unpleasant events affect our learning, and how being able to control these situations can make us stronger emotionally.

Early Life and Learning

Catherine Hartley has always been curious about how our experiences guide our choices and actions. In high school, she read a book by Oliver Sacks. This book helped her decide to study psychology.

College and Early Research

She went to Stanford University for her first degree. There, she joined a lab and studied how humans smell. Her early research showed that a part of the brain helps control sniffing based on how strong a smell is. It also showed that our brains react to smells even when we can't quite detect them.

After college in 1999, Hartley worked as a software engineer. She built smart computer programs for a few years. This experience later helped her think about how intelligence works in her own research.

Graduate Studies

In 2006, Hartley went back to school at New York University. She studied how people react to fear. Her research looked at how different brain structures are linked to fear responses. She found that certain parts of the brain, like the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, are connected to how much fear a person feels.

She also studied how a chemical in the brain called serotonin affects fear memories. Her work suggested that differences in serotonin levels might play a role in why some people are more likely to feel sad or worried.

Postdoctoral Work

After getting her PhD in 2011, Hartley continued her research at Weill Cornell Medical College. She studied how having control over a stressful situation changes how people react to fear. She found that when people felt they had control, they were better at overcoming their fears. This helped them recover faster from scary experiences. Her new work also began to explore how stress affects fear learning as people grow up.

Career and Research

In 2014, Hartley became a professor at Weill Cornell Medical College. She led her own lab, called the Hartley Lab. Here, she focused on how learning and decision-making change as we grow. She also looked at how bad experiences, especially those we can't control during our teenage years, affect our thinking and emotions. She wanted to know if being able to control stressful situations could make people more emotionally strong.

In 2016, Hartley moved back to New York University. She became a professor in the Psychology Department. In 2020, she became a tenured professor, which means she has a permanent position. She also joined the board of the Flux Society, which helps advance research on how the human brain develops.

How Decision-Making Changes as We Grow

Hartley was very interested in how people make decisions and how these strategies change over time. She found that simple decision-making strategies are used by people of all ages. However, more complex strategies start to be used by teenagers and become stronger in adults. This suggests that our ability to make goal-directed decisions develops as we get older.

She also studied how memories of good and bad experiences are remembered by adults and teenagers. She found that strong feelings and clear examples helped both groups remember things better.

Controlling Behavior and Threat Responses

A big part of Hartley's research looks at how being able to control scary things changes our reactions to threats. Scientists knew that animals show less fear when they can control threatening situations. Hartley and her team wanted to see if this was true for humans too.

Using special brain scans, they found that actively avoiding a threat is more important than just getting used to it. This active avoidance leads to longer-lasting changes in how humans react to fear.

Awards and Honors

• 2023 Troland Research Award
• 2020 Cognitive Neuroscience Society Young Investigator Award
• 2019 Early Career Award Society for Neuroeconomics
• 2018 Association for Psychological Science Janet Taylor Spence Award
• 2018 Jacobs Foundation Early Career Fellowship
• 2016 Faculty Early Career Development Award from the National Science Foundation
• 2017 Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship in Neuroscience
• 2016 Elected one of the Rising Stars by the Association for Psychological Science

Select Publications

• Heller AS, Shi TC, Ezie CEC, Reneau TR, Baez LM, Gibbons CJ, Hartley CA. 2020. Association between real-world experiential diversity and positive affect relates to hippocampal-striatal functional connectivity. Nature Neuroscience. PMID 32424287 DOI: 10.1038/s41593-020-0636-4
• Rosenbaum GM, Hartley CA. 2019. Developmental perspectives on risky and impulsive choice. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences. 374: 20180133. PMID 30966918 DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2018.0133
• Gee DG, Bath KG, Johnson CM, Meyer HC, Murty VP, van den Bos W, Hartley CA. 2018. Neurocognitive Development of Motivated Behavior: Dynamic Changes across Childhood and Adolescence. The Journal of Neuroscience: the Official Journal of the Society For Neuroscience. 38: 9433–9445. PMID 30381435 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1674-18.2018
• Boeke EA, Moscarello J, LeDoux JE, Phelps EA, Hartley CA. 2017. Active avoidance: Neural mechanisms and attenuation of Pavlovian conditioned responding. The Journal of Neuroscience: the Official Journal of the Society For Neuroscience. PMID 28408411 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3261-16.2017
• Gershman SJ, Hartley CA. 2015. Individual differences in learning predict the return of fear. Learning & Behavior. 43: 243–50. PMID 26100524 DOI: 10.3758/s13420-015-0176-z
• Hartley CA, Lee FS. 2015. Sensitive periods in affective development: nonlinear maturation of fear learning. Neuropsychopharmacology : Official Publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. 40: 50–60. PMID 25035083 DOI: 10.1038/npp.2014.179
• Hartley CA, Gorun A, Reddan MC, Ramirez F, Phelps EA. 2014. Stressor controllability modulates fear extinction in humans. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. 113: 149–56. PMID 24333646 DOI: 10.1016/j.nlm.2013.12.003
• Hartley CA, McKenna MC, Salman R, Holmes A, Casey BJ, Phelps EA, Glatt CE. 2012. Serotonin transporter polyadenylation polymorphism modulates the retention of fear extinction memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 109: 5493–8. PMID 22431634 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1202044109
• Hartley CA, Phelps EA. 2012. Anxiety and decision-making. Biological Psychiatry. 72: 113–8. PMID 22325982 DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2011.12.027
• Hartley CA, Fischl B, Phelps EA. 2011. Brain structure correlates of individual differences in the acquisition and inhibition of conditioned fear. Cerebral Cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991). 21: 1954–62. PMID 21263037 DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhq253
• Hartley CA, Phelps EA. 2010. Changing fear: the neurocircuitry of emotion regulation. Neuropsychopharmacology : Official Publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. 35: 136–46. PMID 19710632 DOI: 10.1038/npp.2009.121
• Sobel N, Prabhakaran V, Hartley CA, Desmond JE, Zhao Z, Glover GH, Gabrieli JD, Sullivan EV. 1998. Odorant-induced and sniff-induced activation in the cerebellum of the human. The Journal of Neuroscience: the Official Journal of the Society For Neuroscience. 18: 8990–9001. PMID 9787004