David LowIn her academic study Poetry of Attention in the Eighteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan), Margaret Koehler ’95 identifies a pervasive cultivation of attention in 18th-century poetry. The book argues that a plea from a 1692 ode by William Congreve—'Let me be all, but my attention, dead'—embodies a wider aspiration in the period’s poetry to explore overt themes of attention and demonstrate techniques of readerly attention. It historicizes 18th century accounts of attention and pioneers a link between the period's poetry and recent discussions of attention in cognitive psychology. Koehler’s book contributes to the largely neglected history of a psychological trait that…
Lauren RubensteinPsyche Loui, assistant professor of psychology, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavior, recently had a paper, "Effects of Voice on Emotional Arousal," published in Frontiers in Psychology. Loui is lead author, and co-wrote the paper with Justin Bachorik, Hui C. Li and Gottfried Schlaug of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/ Harvard Medical School, where Loui worked as an instructor before coming to Wesleyan this year. The study explores the effects of lyrics and the voice on the emotional processing of music and on listeners' preferences. The researchers found robust effects of vocal content on participants' perceived arousal, independent of the familiarity of the…
Clara Wilkins, assistant professor of psychology, is interested in research showing that whites are increasingly likely to see themselves as victims of racial discrimination, despite persistent gaps in income and other forms of inequality between blacks and whites in the U.S. Perceiving bias against whites is even more pervasive in white young adults than in the population as a whole, with 58 percent of whites aged 18-24 agreeing that, “discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” In a new study, Wilkins and Joseph Wellman, postdoctoral fellow in psychology, investigated how whites react…
The American Psychological Association's (APA) Society for the History of Psychology gave Wilbur Fisk Osborne Professor Jill Morawski the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award at its annual meeting in Honolulu, HI from July 31-Aug. 4. The award is presented to individuals who have "made sustained, outstanding, and unusual contributions to the history of psychology over a career." Graham Richards was also given the award this year. At the organization's 2012 annual meeting in Orlando, Fla., Morawski was invited to deliver the Mary Whiton Calkins Address, named after the first woman president of the APA and an innovative psychologist. The address, given annually at meetings of…
Olivia DrakeHilary Barth, associate professor of psychology, associate professor of neuroscience and behavior; Mariah Schug, visiting assistant professor of psychology; and Kyle MacDonald '10 are the co-authors of "My people, right or wrong? Minimal group membership disrupts preschoolers’ selective trust," published in Cognitive Development, Issue 28, pages 247-259 in 2013. This publication is based on MacDonald's undergraduate thesis, which he conducted in Barth's lab. MacDonald is currently a graduate student in psychology at Stanford University. Elizabeth Chase, Barth's former lab coordinator, also co-authored the paper. Read the paper online here.
Lisa Dierker, professor of psychology, and David Beveridge, professor of chemistry and the Joshua Boger Professor of the Sciences and Mathematics, have received a four-year grant for $599,995 from the National Science Foundation’s Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (TUES) program. This Phase II grant, awarded in August 2013, will support their work on “Passion-Driven Statistics: A multidisciplinary project-based supportive model for statistical reasoning and application,” which began with the development of the QAC 201 “Applied Data Analysis” course and will soon be implemented at other institutions.
Ariel Selya, a visiting faculty in the Psychology Department, received a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health. The award came with a $54,890 grant, which will support her research on "System Dynamics and Dynamic Systems Modeling of Adolescent Smoking Development.”
Clara Wilkins, assistant professor of psychology, and Joseph Wellman, postdoctoral fellow in psychology, are co-authors of a paper titled, “Status Legitimizing Beliefs Predict Positivity Toward Whites Who Claim Anti-White Bias," published online Aug. 15 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Miss the start of MOOC-mania earlier this year? Good news—it’s not too late to check it out! Wesleyan’s next round of massive open online courses (MOOCS) is starting on Coursera in the coming weeks. A brand new MOOC, “Social Psychology,” will be offered by Professor of Psychology Scott Plous starting Aug. 12. The course has generated enormous interest, with more than 170,000 students currently enrolled. “The goal of the course is to explore some entertaining and intriguing psychology findings that students can use to improve their lives, relationships, and work. More than 40 organizations have contributed free readings, video clips…
Wesleyan’s Cognitive Development Labs are bringing their research on how young children think and learn to local museum visitors, thanks to a new partnership with the Connecticut Science Center in Hartford. The partnership provides the public with a rare opportunity to learn about child development and psychological science—topics not often represented at science museums—at the Connecticut Science Center, while allowing the Wesleyan researchers access to a wide pool of subjects to include in their studies. “It’s basically bringing the lab research out into the public, making the science accessible to kids and families, and also collecting data in the process,”…
The Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship is pleased to announce its 2013 Seed Grant and Internship Grant recipients. The PCSE Seed Grant program was launched this spring. Individuals and teams of students competed for $5,000 prizes intended to provide capital to help Wesleyan students launch their socially-oriented project or idea and/or build capacity of their existing social enterprise. The winners are: Circles and Ciphers Project Leader: Evan Okun ’13 Description: This grant will fund a project in Chicago with a leadership development organization that fuses restorative justice practices with hip-hop culture to empower and support predominantly African-American and Latino males,…
Glenn Stowell ’13, Isaiah Sypher’13 and Jacob Eichengreen '13 delivered "Senior Voices" speeches on May 25 in Memorial Chapel. Glenn Stowell ’13 The prompt to which I originally responded for the purpose of putting together this reflection asked me to consider what about my experience here at Wesleyan was meaningful. And that left me to do some serious leg lifting prior to answering that question, as I tried to think about how an experience becomes imbued with meaning at all. When we want to make an experience seem meaningful, we often look backward to a moment by which we can illuminate our…