Billy Mitchell is a second-year doctoral student in the Cognition and Neuroscience program at Temple University. Under the guidance of Assistant Professor Chelsea Helion, he works in the Social & Affective Neuroscience Lab, which studies the neural and psychological underpinnings of self-regulation processes to gain insight towards the factors that may govern adaptive or dysfunctional perceptions, judgments and habits.

Mitchell is interested in researching neural representations of emotion and emotion regulation tendencies as well as the regulation of social behavior and moral judgments. In 2014, he earned a bachelor's degree in Psychology from Loyola University Maryland, then transitioned to a research coordinator position in the Behavioral Pharmacology Research Unit at Johns Hopkins. More recently, he worked with the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia's Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition Department on projects exploring dysregulations in the gut microbiome. 

Since coming to Temple, Mitchell has been working on a project exploring adult-child differences in the neural representation of affective stimuli. His research has already been recognized with an Emotion Pre-Conference Poster Award at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology's 2021 meeting and a Poster Award at the 2021 conference of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society. His recent NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program proposal is for a project exploring the social circumstances in which individuals are motivated to downregulate positive emotional experiences and what situational advantages downregulating positive emotion might provide.

Mitchell hopes that his research can shed light on how people control their emotions to make the best of less-than-ideal circumstances. Importantly, it might be a first step towards exploring the effects that long-term trade-offs between positive affect and situationally specific cognitive advantages might have for vulnerable populations, who may have to prioritize immediate needs and demands at the expense of other long-term well-being outcomes.