Wendy Heller will present "A tale of two anxieties" at the Beckman Institute Director's Seminar at noon Thursday, March 7.
The seminar will be held in 1005 Beckman Institute. Lunch will be provided to participants who register in advance.
Wendy Heller."A tale of two anxieties"
Anxiety has adverse effects on many aspects of human function, affecting academic, social, occupational, and health domains. As just one example of its importance, individuals with high anxiety are at increased risk of cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death worldwide. Treatment of anxiety may improve cardiac symptoms. However, there is more to anxiety than meets the eye, and much remains to be learned about it. In research, clinical and common parlance, anxiety is typically referred to as a unitary phenomenon. In our lab, we have accumulated years of evidence to show that there are at least two types of anxiety with distinct emotional, cognitive, and physiological characteristics. As long as these anxiety types are conflated in research and clinical settings, we will continue to struggle to understand the psychological and physiological manifestations of anxiety as well as its neural mechanisms, and to miss out on opportunities for intervention.
Wendy Heller is a professor in the Psychology Department and a faculty affiliate of the Neuroscience Program, the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, Carle Illinois College of Medicine, and the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment. She serves as Executive Associate Dean for Social and Behavioral Sciences and Area Centers in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and past president of the Society for Research in Psychopathology. She has published over 150 scholarly articles and has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health throughout her career. A clinical psychologist, her research integrates neuropsychological, developmental, and social and personality factors to understand the impact of anxiety and depression on cognition and emotion. She pioneered a neuropsychological perspective on anxiety as a dimensional phenomenon and showed that different types of anxiety have unique associations with cognitive function and dysfunction.
Promoting a more inclusive academy and addressing inequities related to gender, race, ethnicity, and ability status are also central to Heller’s contributions. In 2010 she received the Larine Y. Cowan Make a Difference Award in recognition of two decades of promoting diversity and inclusion at the department, college, campus, and national levels. Since 2013 she has been a member or chair of the campus Diversity Realized at Illinois by Visioning Excellence committee, building an inclusive faculty. In 2014-2015, she served as a Provost Fellow for campus diversity initiatives. As Presidential Fellow of the University of Illinois System from January 2022 through January 2023, she led the Gender Inclusive Leadership Project, and she continues to provide leadership as special assistant to the system’s executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs.
Heller was selected for the President’s Leadership Program in 2019-2020 and was a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project in 2021-2022. She served as director of clinical training of the clinical/community program for over a decade and as head of the Psychology Department from 2015-2021. In 2019 she was awarded the Executive Officer Distinguished Leadership Award by the University of Illinois, and in 2021 she received the LAS Impact Award for demonstrating a spirit of service and sacrifice that went beyond expectations to serve our community during the COVID-19 crisis.
Heller earned a bachelor’s in psychology and Spanish with honors, magna cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in biopsychology from the University of Chicago.
