Our Faculty
Anthony Mancini
Associate Professor
Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
Psychology - PLV
Location
- @Pleasantville
Office Hours
Westchester
- Biography
- Publications & Presentations
- Research & Creative Works
- Professional Contributions & Service
Biography
Anthony Mancini is a clinical psychologist who studies a variety of potentially traumatic events, including interpersonal loss, military deployment, mass trauma, traumatic injury, and life-threatening illness. He also examines the ways acute adversity stimulates social behavior, increases trust and cooperation at a group level, and can, under some conditions, directly improve psychological functioning.
Education
PhD , Columbia University , 2004
MS , Columbia University , 1999
M.Phil , Columbia University , 1999
BA , Hunter College, City University of New York , 1995
Awards and Honors
- APA, Division 22, 2011 - Harold Yuker Award for Research Excellence (awarded to the best paper published in Psychological Rehabilitation)
- National Institutes of Health, 2011 - Loan Repayment Grant Program (renewal)
- National Institutes of Health, 2009 - Loan Repayment Grant Program
Publications
Mancini, A. D. (in press). When acute adversity improves psychological health: A social-contextual framework. Psychological Review.
Mancini, A. D., Littleton, H. L. & Grils, A. E. (2016). Can people benefit from acute stress? Social support, psychological improvement, and resilience after the Virginia Tech campus shootings. Clinical Psychological Science.
RESEARCH INTEREST
Three primary inter-related questions have guided his research thus far: 1) What are the varieties of people's reactions to acute stress? 2) Why does one person manage the storms of acute stress, while another struggles and, in some cases, succumbs to posttraumatic stress disorder or prolonged grief? 3) Why, in some cases, does acute stress stimulate psychological improvement among people who were struggling? To answer these questions, he has worked on longitudinal datasets to better understand individually varying patterns of response. He has also used experimental designs and analogue stressors to identify underlying mechanisms of adaptive stress responses and changes in social behavior, including other-focused emotions, reductions in self-focus, and feelings of awe. He recently developed a theoretical model to better understand these effects or "psychosocial gains from adversity." A description of the model, published in Psychological Review, is here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331876048_When_Acute_Adversity_Improves_Psychological_Health_A_Social-Contextual_Framework
