Meet the People of the Irsay

Biography

Krendl’s research incorporates behavioral, cognitive, neuropsychological, and neuroscience techniques to understand how social cognition changes over the lifespan, and why individuals are stigmatized. More specifically, she has examined this question from three converging perspectives: how stigma affects perceivers; how stigma changes over the adult lifespan; and, how stigma affects its targets. Her research documents how individuals automatically engage cognitive control when evaluating stigma, but not other negative social stimuli. Importantly, her work suggests that while increased cognitive effort may not necessarily have long-term benefits in reducing negative bias, altering individuals’ affective responses to stigma may be more effective in reducing bias.

Krendl’s focus on the well-known relationship between older age and greater stigma, asking whether this id due cohort effects or individual differences in older adults’ cognitive ability. She uses behavioral and fMRI techniques to determine whether individual differences in older adults’ cognitive function or in the extraction of different initial cues lead to older adults’ increased expression of negative bias to stigmatized individuals. This takes a more outcome-oriented turn in her agenda that investigates how mental health stigma affects treatment-seeking, finding that the extent to which perceivers humanize individuals suffering from depression predicts their own intentions to seek mental health treatment.