Maddie Politte-Corn

Maddie Politte-Corn is a third-year graduate student in the Developmental Psychology program at Penn State. Maddie attended Cornell College, where she received a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 2020. As an undergraduate student, she completed an internship at the Centre for Emotional Health in Sydney, Australia, which culminated in her first publication detailing how idealized images on social media contribute to appearance comparisons and body image concerns among young women. Maddie earned a master’s degree in clinical and developmental research from Vanderbilt University in 2022, where she continued studying the impact of social media on adolescent mental health and was introduced to electroencephalogram (EEG) as a way to characterize emotion processing and regulation among individuals at risk for psychopathology. Maddie’s interests evolved into a desire to understand the longitudinal risk factors for developing depression and anxiety, including emotion processing and regulation, which drew her to the work of Dr. Kristin Buss at Penn State.

As a doctoral student at Penn State, Maddie seeks to address her research questions from a developmental perspective, with a focus on translational science. She is interested in how neurobiological vulnerabilities and social experiences contribute to social anxiety and depression in adolescence. Findings from her first-year project showed that high perceived support from peers and low support from family members increased social anxiety risk for adolescents at temperamental risk. In her second year at Penn State, Maddie was funded on a TL1 training fellowship through the Clinical and Translational Science Institute. Her research project during the fellowship explored how neurophysiological markers of social threat sensitivity, including eye-tracking, EEG, and cortisol measures, may be associated with social anxiety and depression. She is currently pursuing a dual-title program in social and behavioral neuroscience to receive additional neuroscience training.

Maddie’s dissertation will address the role of neurocognitive social threat sensitivity in the development of internalizing problems during adolescence. After graduation, she plans to continue her work on the early detection and prevention of depression and anxiety with a focus on translational science.