Sarah Rose Cavanagh Ph.D.

Sarah Rose Cavanagh, Ph.D. is on the faculty at Assumption College, where she directs the Laboratory for Cognitive and Affective Science and serves as the Associate Director for Grants and Research in the Center for Teaching Excellence. She also collaborates with Heather L. Urry's Emotion, Brain, and Behavior Laboratory as a Research Affiliate. Her research considers whether the strategies people choose to regulate their emotions and the degree to which they successfully accomplish this regulation can predict trajectories of psychological functioning over time. She has explored these questions in college students exposed to mood inductions, in a cross-cultural trauma-exposed sample, and in the context of remitted major depression. Most recently, she is investigating whether small interventions targeting emotions at the start of class can yield benefits for student learning. This work is funded by a generous grant from the Davis Educational Foundation. Her book The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion was published by West Virginia University Press in 2016. Her second book HIVEMIND was published in September 2019 by Grand Central Publishing and is available here. You can follow along on Instagram here, though you much more often can find Sarah on Twitter.