Dr. Jolie Baumann Wormwood received dual bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and psychology from Ithaca College in 2007 before completing her doctorate in psychology at Northeastern University in 2012. Her research examines how affect and emotion guide perception and decision making, with a particular focus on experience and behavior in stressful or threatening contexts. She is dedicated to understanding both the underlying causes and the real-world implications of emotion’s influence on perception and decision making and has adopted an interdisciplinary approach to do so. She utilizes techniques from vision science to study how affect may shape visual perception and peripheral psychophysiological measures to assess associations among bodily activity (e.g., changes in heart rate or sweat gland activity), affective experience and behavior. In addition, she is interested in examining the complexly-determined emotional responses and threat-perception ramifications of exposure to real-world threats, such as incidents of mass violence. For example, she has studied how the Boston Marathon bombings influenced Boston community members’ perceptions of potentially threatening people and objects, as well as how their initial emotional responses to the terrorist event predicted later mental health outcomes. Dr. Wormwood’s research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences.
