Cassandra Brown

Contact

Area of expertise

Clinical Psychology

Supervisors

Research interests

I am interested in individual differences in aging, generally, why some individuals are able to maintain a high quality of life into their 6th decade and well beyond while other older adults suffer from morbidities that negatively impact daily living. Current evidence suggests that lifestyle factors are related to individual differences in wellbeing and cognitive function. I am interested in lifestyle factors associated with positive versus less desirable trajectories of cognition in aging such as the development of dementia. Particular lifestyle factors of interest are social activity and social connectedness and its importance for cognitive function and well-being. Other recent work has focused on using growth mixture modeling to analyze the utility of within person trajectories of Mini-Mental Status exam scores in identifying cases of dementia. A second area of interest is in exploring neural correlates of behavior and experience to help understand normal and disordered functioning.

Representative publications

Brown, C. L. & Beninger, R. J. (Accepted). People newly in love are more responsive to positive feedback. Psychological Reports.

Cuddy, L.L., Duffin, J. M., Gill. S., Brown, C. L., Sikka, R. & Vanstone, A. D. (Accepted). Memory for tunes and lyrics in dementia of the Alzheimer type. Music Perception.

Representative presentations

Brown, C. L., & Piccinin, A. M. (2011, October). Rate of MMSE Change Approaching Diagnosis of Dementia: Implications for Longitudinal Studies. Poster accepted for presentation at the 40th Annual Scientific and Educational Meeting of the CAG & 4th Pan American Congress of the IAGG, Ottawa, ON.

Lee, J., Brown, C., Dey, A., & Cuddy, L. (2011, June). Recognition of auditory and visual emotional speech prosody for young and older adults. Poster presented at the Canadian Psychological Association Annual Convention, Toronto, ON. (Published abstract: Canadian Psychology 52:2a 2011 p.51).

Lee, J., Brown, C., Dey, A., & Cuddy, L. (2011, March). Aging and sensitivity to emotional prosody. Poster presentioned at the Inagural Conference of the Rotman Research Institute and the Kunin-Lunenfeld Applied Research Unit. Toronto, ON