Giving refuge, advancing research
Yale Stress Center head promotes healing of the body, mind, and brain
Rajita Sinha, Ph.D., says that the emotional expressiveness of the Indian classical dance studies of her youth laid the foundation for a lifelong interest in the brain-body tango that regulates mood and behavior. As an undergraduate in her native Delhi, she studied biopsychology, conducting research on the effects of marijuana and working at a counseling center. For her graduate work at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, she studied how emotion is manifested physiologically, a thread that she has carried through her subsequent work on the brain-altering effects of drugs and alcohol.
Throughout, Sinha has observed and studied how people cope with stress and with wanting—“The abundance of choices available in the world, and easy access to commodities, including drugs, challenges the body’s motivational systems in novel ways,” she says. (more…)