Rachael Wright

Rachael Wright is a Cognitive Neuroscience PhD student who entered through the Cognitive Neuroscience Admitting Program (CNAP). She received her B.S. in Psychology (Psychobiology emphasis) from Santa Clara University in 2015. After graduation, she worked as a Clinical Research Coordinator in Dr. Amit Etkin's lab at Stanford University until coming to Duke in 2018. Now jointly advised by Kevin LaBar and Alison Adcock, she studies questions at the intersection of affective neuroscience and learning.
Rachael is interested in how people learn affective regulation skills. In other words, how people learn and improve upon the mental strategies they use to regulate their feelings. Developing good self-regulation of affect is crucial for mental health and well-being, and and poor self-regulation is implicated in many psychiatric disorders. Rachael aims to bridge the neuroscience of learning and memory with the neuroscience of emotion regulation to lend new insight into the mechanisms of self-regulation improvement.

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