Gerpha Gerlin '16On Friday, May 9, the Center for Humanities held its last theory salon for the 2013-2014 academic year. The intimate faculty-student presentation revealed ground-breaking research on the Stanley Milgram "shock" obedience experiment, led by Jill Morawski, the Wilbur Fisk Osborne Professor of Psychology, professor of science in society, professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, and assistants Ethan Hoffman ’14 and Nick Myerberg ’14. Stanley Milgram, a psychologist from Yale University, is known for his experiment on obedience to authority figures. In the 1960s, Milgram measured the willingness of participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform…
Olivia DrakeHilary Barth, associate professor of psychology, associate professor of neuroscience and behavior, is the co-author of of "Preschoolers trust novel members of accurate speakers’ groups and judge them favorably," published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Issue 67, pages 872-883, in 2014. The paper is based on work from BA '08/MA '09 student Keera Bhandari's thesis, and research by former undergraduates Kyle MacDonald '10 and Jenn Garcia '10, and former lab manager Elizabeth Chase. It is known that by age 3, children track a speaker's record of past accuracy and use it as a cue to current reliability. Through two different experiments,…
Natalie Robichaud ’14Wesleyan’s Cognitive Development Labs hosted Family Math Night at Edna Stevens Elementary School in Cromwell, Conn. on April 9. The event was full of games and activities for preschool children to play and get them excited about math while showing families activities that they can do at home to prepare their children for kindergarten. Assistant Professor of Psychology Anna Shusterman’s students designed the math games as part of a research methods class. (more…)
Once a week, a group of Wesleyan faculty gather to work on individual projects. Although they come from different departments - psychology, classical studies, government, among others - they're all working towards the same goal: to write, be published, and celebrate each others' accomplishments. The Wesleyan Faculty Writing Group, founded in 2010, provides an opportunity for faculty to come sit in a shared space and work on any writing projects they are pursuing. Participants are currently working on book proposals, book manuscripts, articles, reviews, grant and fellowship applications and op-eds. "All of us have found that the occasional change of…
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Lauren RubensteinIn this issue of The Wesleyan Connection, we speak with Mike Robinson, assistant professor of psychology, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavior, who joined the faculty in January. Q: Welcome to Wesleyan, Professor Robinson! Please fill us in on your life up to now. A: I was born and grew up in France, in the west suburbs of Paris, but my parents are both British, so that makes me bi-national and bilingual. I went to high school in France and decided to go to university to study neuroscience at the University of Sussex in the U.K. Then I went to…
Always wanted to take a course with legendary film professor Jeanine Basinger? Miss the first run of Professor of Psychology Scott Plous’ wildly popular “Social Psychology” MOOC? Now’s your chance! The next round of Wesleyan’s massive open online courses (MOOCs) is starting up this month, with “Marriage in the Movies: A History” launching April 21. Basinger, the Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies, is teaching the course based on her book, I Do and I Don’t: A History of Marriage in the Movies. “This is essentially a descriptive course on stories and stars and business strategies,” says Basinger, who is also…
The Board of Trustees recently conferred tenure to four Wesleyan faculty. Their promotions take effect July 1. They are: Lisa Cohen, associate professor of English; Abigail Hornstein, associate professor of economics; Miri Nakamura, associate professor of Asian languages and literatures; and Anna Shusterman, associate professor of psychology. Other tenure announcements may be released after the Board's May meeting. "Please join us in congratulating them on their impressive records of accomplishment," said Wesleyan President Michael Roth. Brief descriptions of their areas of research and teaching are below: Lisa Cohen joined the English Department’s creative writing faculty in Fall 2007. Her courses are…
Jillian Roberts ’15 presented a poster at the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association in Boston, Mass. on March 15. The poster, titled "Influence of minimal group membership on children’s ideas of equality," is co-authored by Jessica Taggart, research associate and Psychology Department lab coordinator, and Hilary Barth, associate professor of psychology, associate professor of neuroscience and behavior. Roberts developed the project herself and has conducted the research over the past two years.
Psyche Loui, assistant professor of psychology, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavior, presented a talk at a symposium held March 6-8 at the University of Rochester Medical Center's Schmitt Program on Integrative Brain Research (SPIBR). Her talk, titled, "Action and Perception in the Musical Brain," described current research from her lab and others that related to the structure and function of the brain to music perception and production, with examples from tone-deafness, absolute pitch, music learning and strong emotional responses to music.
Mike SembosSpelman College President Beverly Daniel Tatum ’75 was presented with a national academic leadership award from the Carnegie Corp. of New York in December 2013. She was the first recipient from a historically black college and the first ever in the state of Georgia. Tatum was selected because of her work supporting female students pursuing science, technology, engineering and math at the university. More African-American women earned doctorates at Spelman in those fields between 1997 and 2006 than at Georgia Tech, Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill combined. Tatum was a psychology major at Wesleyan who went…
Patricia Rodriguez Mosquera, associate professor of psychology, and her former student, Leslie Tan BA/MA '11, are co-authors of a paper published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Nov. 19, 2013. In the paper, titled, "Shared Burdens, Personal Costs on the Emotional and Social Consequences of Family Honor," the authors present two studies on the consequences of threats to family honor. In Study 1, 99 Pakistanis (67 females, 30 males, 2 undisclosed) and 134 European-Americans (65 females, 69 males) reported a recent insult to their family where the offender was either a family or a non-family member. The insults targeted the family…