Clara E Haeffner

Hi! I’m Clara, a 2nd-year PhD student in Cognitive Psychology at Yale University, where I work with Robb Rutledge.

My work examines how affect shapes the ways we perceive and respond to uncertainty, with a particular interest in contexts like mental health disorders and stress. I use computational modeling of decision-making, reinforcement learning, smartphone data, and longitudinal approaches to better understand how these processes differ across individuals and how they change over time.

Questions I’m thinking about:

• How do mental health conditions like depression and anxiety shape decisions under uncertainty?
• How do our emotions and stress in daily life shape the choices we make?
• What can signals like mood and language reveal about why we make the choices we do in the moment?
• How do we develop our preferences towards uncertainty from past experience?

Before Yale, I worked with Silvia Lopez-Guzman as a postbac IRTA at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and completed a thesis with Stacey Schaefer and Richie Davidson at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.