[5] After graduating from Stanford in 1999 with a Bachelors of Science, Hartley decided to pursue work in industry as a software engineer at a small artificial intelligence startup in New York City.
[9] Her article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that specific risk alleles in the human serotonin transporter are associated with spontaneous fear recovery after extinction and heightened depression and anxiety.
[9] Hartley completed her PhD in 2011, and then pursued her postdoctoral work at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell Medical College.
[3] The work she published from her graduate studies explored how control of an aversive experience is related to the behavioral consequences and fear responses.
[13] As an assistant professor in the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology and as a principal investigator of the Hartley Lab, she focused on exploring how learning and decision making change throughout development and how adverse experiences and uncontrollable events in adolescence contribute to aberrations in cognitive and emotional processing and how the ability to control stressors might enhance emotional resilience and improve goal-directed cognition.
h[18] Following this study, Hartley probed the cognitive mechanisms by which the memories of reinforced and unreinforced aversive events are enhanced across adults and adolescents.
[19] Her work in humans supported the findings from rodents that acquisition of Pavlovian conditioned aversive responses is compared across adolescents and adults.
[19] A large component of Hartley's research pertains to exploring how exerting behavioral control over threatening stimuli changes the response to threats in the environment.
[20] Using fMRI they found that active avoidance is more important than extinction in leading to long term changes in fear responses in humans.