Rebecca Ready

Professor

Dr. Ready is a geriatric neuropsychologist with research interests in the assessment of emotion regulation in healthy aging and in clinical populations, including Mild Cognitive Impairment, Alzheimer’s disease, and Huntington’s disease. She studies emotion reactions in the lab and in daily life and is interested in how individual difference factors, such as executive functions, memory, and personality affect emotion regulation outcomes. She utilizes multiple methods to measure emotion variables, such as subjective reports, neuropsychological testing, observation, cortisol, and physiological data. The goal of her research program is to determine mechanisms that drive emotion health and well-being in healthy aging and clinical populations.

Current Research
Her current research focuses on emotion reactivity and recovery after negative mood induction in younger adults, older adults, and older adults with Mild Cognitive Impairment. We determine how emotion regulation strategies, executive functions, and memory affect reactivity to sadness mood induction that involves film clips about interpersonal loss. We collect extensive data on each participant, including emotional traits, neuropsychological scores, physiological reactivity, subjective emotions, and behaviors. Preliminary data suggest that older adults with greater memory capabilities are better able to recover from sadness mood induction than older adults with less strong memory capabilities. These data speak illuminate a mechanism underlying risk for emotion dysregulation in older adult with memory impairment. Future studies will address reactivity to different negative emotions and if older adults can be taught to implement effective emotion regulation techniques.

Learn more at: www.psych.umass.edu/people/rebeccaready/

Academic Background

BA Northwestern University, 1995
PhD University of Iowa, 2001
Predoctoral Internship: Brown Medical School, 2000-2001
Postdoctoral Training: Brown Medical School, 2001-2003
Postdoctoral Training: University of Pittsburgh, 2003-2004

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Publications

Rohling, M., Ready, R.E., Dhanani, L., & Suhr, J.A. (2020, online). Shift Happens: The Gender Composition in Clinical Neuropsychology Over Five Decades. The Clinical Neuropsychologist. doi.org/10.1080/13854046.2020.1778791

Mather, M., & Ready, R.E. (2020, online). Greater negative affect and mixed emotions during spontaneous reactions to sad films in older than younger adults. European Journal of Ageing. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10433-020-00565-8

Mantua, J.* & Ready, R.E. (2019). Emotion habituation is accelerated in chronic mild traumatic brain injury. Brain Injury, 33, 1467-1475. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699052.2019.1646434

Broggi, M.* Ready, R.E., & Moore, D.L. (2019). Screening for Reading Disability in university students with phonological processing and working memory tasks. Dyslexia, 25, 256-266. http://dx.doi.org.silk.library.umass.edu/10.1002/dys.1625

Ready, R.E.*, Boileau, N.R., Barton, S.K., Lai, J.-S., McCormack, M.K., Cella, D., Fritz, N.E., Paulsen, J.S., & Carlozzi, N.E. (2019). Positive affect and well-being in HD moderates the association between functional impairment and HRQOL outcomes. Journal of Huntington’s Disease, 8, 221-232. 10.3233/JHD-180341

Hahn, E., Downing, N.R., Stout, J.C., Paulsen, J.S., Ready, R.E., Goodnight, S., Lai, J. S., Miner, J.A., & Carlozzi, N. (2018). Understanding the need for assistance with survey completion in people with Huntington Disease. Quality of Life Research, 27, 810-810. DOI 10.1007/s11136- 017-1747-6

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29214414

Lundquist, T.S., Santorelli, G.D., & Ready, R.E. (2017). Measurement of anxiety about Alzheimer’s disease in midlife and older adults. Prevention and Health Promotion: Research, Social Action, Practice and Training, 10, 22-28.

Rebecca Ready

Institute for Applied Life Sciences