Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Arts, UBC
Member of the UBC Women’s Health Research Cluster
Full Member
Rebecca Todd is an Associate Professor in the UBC Department of Psychology and a CIHR New Investigator and Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Fellow. She received a PhD in Developmental Science and Neuroscience from University of Toronto, and post-doctoral training in cognitive neuroscience at the Rotman Research Institute and University of Toronto. Her research program focuses on neurocognitive processes underlying the interaction between human emotion and cognition in health and in pathology. It employs brain imaging methods and laboratory experiments to investigate how we process the affective salience, or emotional/motivational importance, of objects and events around us, and how such affective salience influences what we see, how we learn, and what we remember. It also focuses on individual differences in how we filter the world so that we are more likely to perceive specific categories of salient event (e.g., threatening vs. rewarding), and how such filters develop over time and influence behaviour, with major consequences for emotional health and wellbeing.
Dr. Todd’s research interests include:
-Brain systems and pharmacology underlying active and inhibitory avoidance processes, and how these are altered in Major Depressive Disorder
-Understanding dynamic processes by which distant sources of attentional guidance, including expectation and different types of emotional experience, compete and interact
-How do specific sensory systems treat emotional vs. discriminatory information?
-In the prescence of stress, how do hormones and cannabinoids influence memory and underlying brain systems in women in the perimenopausal years and beyond?