Body, Mind, and Brain Lab

Pietra is a graduate student in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Vanderbilt University, specializing in Clinical Science. She graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 2015 with a Bachelor of Philosophy (BPhil) and a Bachelor of Science (BS) in Psychology and Film Studies, and with a certificate in the Conceptual Foundations of Medicine from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science. The majority of her undergraduate research was conducted at Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic and focused on understanding changes in the brain associated with aging, as well as computational modeling approaches to understand cognitive control and their disturbances in serious mental illness and early psychosis.

She joined the Department of Psychological Sciences at Vanderbilt University in 2017 as a Clinical Psychology PhD student. Her doctoral work has focused on the analysis of non-verbal and interpersonal behavior, and the influence emotion regulation techniques have on facilitating and maintaining meaningful social relationships. She recently completed a project that used a within-subjects design to asses interoception (the sense of the physiological condition of the body) in two distinct physiological domains, cardiac and respiratory.