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…
Olivia Drake(more…)
Binge eating can cause depression, lead to excessive weight gain and potentially cause long-term damage in binge eaters. But a new study shows that a simple, self-guided 12-week program can decrease binge eating for up to an entire year – while reducing costs of treatment. Conducted by Ruth Striegel-Moore, the Walter A. Crowell University Professor of the Social Sciences, professor of psychology, and researchers at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research and Rutgers University, the study was aimed at finding a way to effectively treat sufferers from this disorder that affects about 3 percent of people in the United…
This issue, we ask 5 Questions to...Lisa Dierker, chair and professor of psychology. Dierker provided us with some information on her research findings. Q. How did you become interested in researching adolescents who smoke? A: Early in my career, I was selected as a faculty scholar by the Tobacco Etiology Research Network. This network was a multidisciplinary initiative sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and was aimed at attracting junior scholars into the field in hopes of accelerating research into the causes and mechanisms by which experimentation with tobacco leads to chronic and dependent use. At that time, as…
Lisa Dierker, chair and professor of psychology, is the co-author of "Early Emerging Nicotine-Dependence Symptoms: A Signal of Propensity for Chronic Smoking Behavior in Adolescents," published in The Journal of Pediatrics, Jan 25, 2010.
Steve Stemler, assistant professor of psychology, is the co-author of "The socially skilled teacher and the development of tacit knowledge," published in the British Educational Research Journal, Feb. 24, 2010
Matthew Kurtz, assistant professor of psychology, was interviewed and quoted in a Feb. 10 issue of Medscape Medical News. The article is titled "Mixed Results for Computer-Assisted Cognitive Remediation in Schizophrenia." Although computer-assisted cognitive remediation can help patients with schizophrenia improve their performance on training tests, these improvements do not generalize to broader neuropsychological or functional outcome measures, according to new research. The remediation program study is published in the February issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry. "I thought this was a very well-conducted study with a strong sample size and paradoxical findings," Kurtz says in the article. "It's…
This issue we ask 5 Questions of...Assistant Professor of Psychology and Assistant Professor of Neuroscience and Behavior Barbara Juhasz. Q. How did you first become interested in psychology? A. I’ve always been fascinated by how the mind works and why people behave the way they do. Since early in high school, I had the idea that I wanted to be a research psychologist. At that time, I really did not know what the field of psychology actually consisted of. Like most people, I believe, I thought psychology meant psychopathology. Once I started studying psychology at the college level, I realized…
To determine the difference between a decisive and an indecisive person, follow the movements of their eyes. Andrea Patalano, associate professor of psychology, and Barbara Juhasz, assistant professor of psychology, have collaborated on research examining how decisive and indecisive people differ in their processing of information, which is a little-studied area. Their full findings are scheduled to be published in the near future, and both researchers are excited about what they found. Patalano has spent many years studying decision-making while Juhasz has spent time tracking readers’ eye movements using a device called an eye-tracker. Since the researchers were examining the…
Lisa Dierker, chair and professor of psychology, and David Beveridge, the University Professor of the Sciences and Mathematics, professor of chemistry, received a $174,999 grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant will support an inquiry based, supportive approach to statistical reasoning and applications. The award will be applied Jan. 1, 2010 through Dec. 31, 2012.
Four weeks before the nations meet in Copenhagen to try to avert the catastrophes that global warming may bring, ABC News Correspondent William Blakemore ’65 will identify many surprising psychological factors at play as people in all walks of life deal with the latest "hard news" on climate. Blakemore will speak on "The Many Psychologies of Global Warming," during a talk at 8 p.m. Nov. 3 in Memorial Chapel. He'll explore new definitions of sanity that may pertain, and give examples displaying different "psychologies, as well as manmade global warming's place in "the long history of narcissistic insults to humanity…
Charles Sanislow, assistant professor of psychology, received a $349,939 grant from the National Institute of Health for his research titled "Cognitive Control in Borderline & Trauma Psychopathology." The grant, awarded Aug. 24, will be applied over two years. It is a continuation of a six-year grant transferred from Yale University.