Stephanie Brown

Stephanie Brown is an Associate Professor of Preventive Medicine at SUNY Stony Brook at the Center for Medical Humanities in Preventive Medicine, and she holds a joint appointment at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. She received her Ph. D. in Social Psychology from Arizona State University. Dr. Brown’s research includes a series of empirical papers and NSF and NIH-funded projects suggesting that the health benefits of social contact are due to the provision, as opposed to the receipt, of social support. Currently, Dr. Brown is examining physiological mechanisms that account for this effect as well as implications for the darker side of human experience including depression, suicidality, and PTSD. These lines of research are designed to shed light into the mechanisms underlying a caregiving motivational system, including its evolutionary origins.