Olivia DrakePatricia Rodriguez Mosquera, assistant professor of psychology, organized and chaired a recent conference on honor and honor cultures in Barcelona, Spain, Aug. 20-24. It was funded by the European Association of Social Psychology and the British Academy. The conference had an interdisciplinary and international focus. It brought together international experts on honor from anthropology and psychology. This is the first conference on honor and honor cultures ever organized in psychology. Rodriguez Mosquera has since been invited to guest-edit a special issue on honor for the journal Group Processes and Intergroup Relations.
Matthew Kurtz, associate professor of psychology, associate professor of neuroscience and behavior, is the author of “Treatment approaches with a special focus on neurocognition: overview and empirical results,” published in Understanding and Treating Neuro- and Social-Cognition in Schizophrenia Patients, in 2010 and “Compensatory Strategies; Insight: Effects on Rehabilitation; Rivermead Behavioral Memory Test,” published in Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology, New York: Springer, 2010.
John Seamon, professor of psychology, professor of neuroscience and behavior, is the author of “Memorizing Milton’s Paradise Lost: A study of a septuagenarian exceptional memorizer,” published in Memory, 2010.
Jill Morawski, professor of psychology, professor of science in society, professor of feminist, gender and sexuality studies, is the author of “The Location of our Debates: Finding, Fixing and Enacting Reality,” published in Theory and Psychology; “Review of Beyond the Box: B.F. Skinner's Technology of Behavior from Laboratory to Life,” published in Isis; and “Postwar Promises and Perplexities in the Social Sciences: The Case of ‘Socialization’,” published in History of Psychology.
David PesciSure, first-year teachers need to be masters of their subject material and their classrooms, but to be truly effective in that first year and beyond teachers also have learn one vital skill: avoiding “bad” decisions. “Novice teachers, in particular, don’t necessarily need to make good decisions right away, but what they must develop is the tacit knowledge to identify what a bad decision or bad response may be. That may sound easy in theory, but when you consider all of the challenges that come from outside the classroom such as administrative duties, dealing with colleagues and dealing with parents, it…
Olivia DrakeCharles Sanislow, assistant professor of psychology, participated in a National Institute of Mental Health meeting in Bethesda, Maryland on July 13-14 for the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project. RDoC aims to create new diagnostic criteria for researching mental disorders, and this meeting addressed the role of working memory in this effort. Sanislow is a member of the RDoC steering committee and co-authored a commentary describing the RDoC in the July issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry, 167, pp. 748-751.
Nicaraguan Sign Language, developed only 30 years ago by Deaf children in Nicaragua needing a way to communicate, offers insight to ways an adapted language affects thought processes. In a new study, which was published June 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, co-author Anna Shusterman, assistant professor of psychology explains how human spatial cognition depends on the acquisition of specific aspects of spatial language. The article, titled “Evidence from an emerging sign language reveals that language supports spatial cognition,” is co-authored by Jennie Pyers (Wellesley), Ann Senghas (Barnard College), Elizabeth Spelke (Harvard) and Karen Emmorey (San…
Quality-of-life for patients with Schizophrenia has been recognized as a crucial domain of outcome in schizophrenia treatment, and yet its determinants are not well understood. Arielle Tolman ’10, who studied "Neurocognitive Predictors of Objective and Subjective Quality-of-Life in Individuals with Schizophrenia: A Meta-Analytic Investigation” as her senior honors thesis, will have the opportunity to share her research with other scientists interested in schizophrenia. This month, the editors of Schizophrenia Bulletin accepted Tolman’s paper for publication in an upcoming edition. “This is a real achievement, particularly at the undergraduate level,” says the paper’s co-author and Tolman’s advisor Matthew Kurtz, assistant professor…
Lisa Dierker, chair of psychology, professor of psychogy, is the author of "Nicotine Dependence Symptoms among Recent Onset Adolescent Smokers,' published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 106; pages 126–132, in 2010.
Barbara Juhasz, assistant professor of psychology, is the co-author of “Parafoveal processing in reading is reduced across a morphological boundary,” published in Cognition, 116, pages 136-142, in 2010.
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Corrina KerrHilary Barth, assistant professor of psychology, was recently awarded a five-year, $761,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study “magnitude biases in mathematical cognition, learning, and development.” Barth will be conducting a series of studies with children and adults in the Cognitive Development Laboratory at Wesleyan to investigate abstract and perceptual magnitude biases. The grant, which begins this year, comes from the NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program. The program is only available to non-tenured faculty. Barth’s colleague Anna Shusterman was awarded a CAREER grant in 2009. “The psychology department is thrilled about Professor Barth's accomplishment,” says Lisa…