17³Ô¹Ï

Before joining 17³Ô¹Ï, she served on the psychology faculties at the University of Southern California and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she continues to collaborate with colleagues through ongoing multi-institutional research programs.

Dr. Martins is also a licensed clinical psychologist. She completed her clinical internship and postdoctoral fellowship in geropsychology at the VA Boston Healthcare System, where her work focused on aging, chronic illness, palliative care, and caregiver resilience.

Student Research Opportunities

Students can apply to participate in the Neural Vitality Laboratory through Directed Research. Depending on the project, students can:

• Help design new studies and pilot them

• Learn to recruit and collaborate with community older adults

• Collect fNIRS neuroimaging data with community members

• Gain computer programming skills (no prior experience required)

• Learn to prepare, preprocess, and analyze experimental data

• Present findings at national conferences

• Contribute as co-authors on scientific manuscripts

Ongoing Lab Research Projects:

Effort Allocation in Interpersonal Emotion Regulation 

This research examines how people divide and coordinate the work of regulating emotion together. New research at 17³Ô¹Ï will use fNIRS hyperscanning, which measures two people’s brain activity at the same time, during naturalistic conversations about personal stressors. These experiments will test whether emotional support reduces effort for the recipient, shifts some of the work to the supporter, or involves coordinated changes in effort across both people over time.

Storytelling, Memory Integration and Emotional Resilience

This research examines how people connect past and present challenges to regulate emotion and build resilience, and how age and accumulated experience shape this process. Upcoming fMRI analyses will compare patterns of brain activity in younger and older adults and test whether people engage regions of the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex differently when a new emotional experience resembles, rather than differs from, something they have experienced before.

Effort and Flexibility in Individual Emotion Regulation

This research examines how the effectiveness of coping depends on context, such as when regulation begins, the type and source of stress, the mental effort it requires, and how people select different strategies in response to changing goals across adulthood. Upcoming analyses will combine smartphone surveys, cognitive tasks, and smartwatch heart-rate data to test whether people’s cognitive and physiological states in the moment predict their strategy choices, regulatory effort, and emotional outcomes.

Community-Engaged Collaborations

Dr. Martins seeks to develop reciprocal partnerships in which the priorities of older adults, caregivers, and families inform research, teaching, and student training. Through collaborations with Alzheimer’s Los Angeles and senior housing communities in East Los Angeles, students can help facilitate stress-management workshops and caregiver support groups, promote intergenerational connection, and learn directly from community members. These partnerships also help generate research questions and resources that respond to community needs.

Courses 

PSYC 431: Clinical Psychology

This course introduces major theories and evidence-based approaches to psychological assessment and intervention. Students consider psychological concerns within cultural, relational, developmental, and biological contexts while practicing foundational helping skills.

PSYC 490: Contemporary Topics Seminar: Human Development and Aging

This seminar examines biological, cognitive, emotional, and social changes in later life and how they shape health, decision-making, and well-being. Through interviews with older adults in the community, students connect developmental theory to lived experience.