Psychology Department

Three social ventures started by Wesleyan students were recently awarded $5,000 seed grants in the Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship's annual Seed Grant Challenge. They are Kindergarten Kickstart, TRAP House and Walking Elephants Home. The last weekend in February, all six finalists for the seed grants presented pitches for their ventures before the Board of Trustees, Patricelli Center Advisory Board and Seed Grant judges, as well as representatives of CT Innovations and the ‎State of Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, fellow students, and others. The event was also livestreamed. One of the other finalists, <Zim/Code>, chose to withdraw from the…

Hilary Barth and Andrea Patalano, associate professors of psychology, recently co-authored a paper in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review along with two former Psychology Department undergraduates, Laura Machlin and Jason Saltiel. The paper is titled, “The Role of Numeracy and Approximate Number System Acuity in Predicting Value and Probability Distortion.” When people make “risky decisions” like choosing between two gambles with different values and different probabilities of success, their choices appear to be based on distorted versions of both the values and probabilities. Although there are many theories attempting to explain the distortion, we don’t know exactly why it happens. This study…

A paper by Assistant Professor of Psychology Clara Wilkins, Alexander Hirsch '13 and Michael Inkles '12 has been published in the journal Group Processes & Intergroup Relations. Titled, "The threat of racial progress and the self-protective nature of perceiving anti-White bias," the paper describes two studies in which the researchers examine whether racial progress is threatening to whites, and if perceiving anti-white bias assuages that threat. The first study showed that whites primed with racial progress—by reading an article on social advancement by minorities—exhibited evidence of threat: lower implicit self-worth relative to the baseline. The second study replicated the threat effect…

Professor of Psychology Scott Plous has been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He was inducted on Feb. 13 during a ceremony in Washington, D.C., part of the association's annual meeting. Plous was one of eight fellows newly elected to the Psychology section of the AAAS this year. He was chosen "for distinguished contributions to social psychology, particularly understanding decision-making and prejudice, and for communication of psychology science to the public." Founded in 1848, the AAAS is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of all people. Fellows are…

Wesleyan will present the first-ever creative writing specialization on the Coursera platform, beginning Feb. 9. Taught by four award-winning authors, the specialization is open to anyone with a love of reading or a drive to invent a story or tell their own. Titled “Creative Writing: The Craft of Story,” the specialization will include four courses, plus a capstone.

Associate Professor Barbara Juhasz, Akila Raoul '16 and Micaela Kaye '16 visited the Green Street Teaching and Learning Center Dec. 2 to lead a workshop on word recognition. Juhasz is associate professor of psychology, associate professor of integrative sciences and associate professor of neuroscience and behavior. The trio worked with students enrolled in Green Street's AfterSchool program. During this special half day program, Juhasz spoke to the Green Street students (in grades 1-5) about her word recgonition research at Wesleyan and then lead a hands-on workshop involving word games. "Our students had a wonderful time exploring the concept of compound…

Psyche Loui, assistant professor of psychology, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavior, assistant professor of integrated sciences, is the co-author of a new study, "Rhythmic Effects of Syntax Processing in Music and Language" published in Frontiers in Psychology in November. The article's lead author is Harim Jung '16, and it is also co-authored by Samuel Sontag '14 and YeBin "Shiny" Park '15. According to Loui, the paper grew out of her Advanced Research Methods in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience course, and is the precursor to Jung's senior and master's theses. The study uses a behavioral test to look into how music…

On Nov. 9, more than 200 people gathered to celebrate the launch of The World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Research and Capacity Building in Mental Health at Columbia University, Department of Psychiatry. The event, Global Mental Health Priorities and Opportunities, provided a platform for discourse around the challenges humans are tackling in mental health. Ruth Weissman, the Walter A. Crowell University Professor of the Social Sciences, professor of psychology, joined a panel discussion on "Global Mental Health Priorities and Opportunities," which was moderated by Pulitzer Prize winning author Sheryl WuDunn. Weissman and other leaders in the field discussed stigma…

Associate Professor Barbara Juhaz, Yun-Hsuan Lai '14 and Michelle Woodcock '14 are the co-authors of a paper titled "A database of 629 English compound words: Ratings of familiarity, lexeme meaning dominance, semantic transparency, age-of-acquisition, imageability, and sensory experience," published in Behavior Research Methods, 47(4), pages 1004-1019 in 2015. Juhasz is associate professor of psychology, associate professor of integrative sciences, associate professor of neuroscience and behavior. In this study, the authors collected ratings on 629 English compound words for six variables: familiarity, age of acquisition, semantic transparency, lexeme meaning dominance, imageability, and sensory experience ratings. All of the compound words selected for this study are contained…

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Breaking news: You may be a pizza-holic. Mike Robinson, professor of psychology, professor of neuroscience and behavior, was called on by CNN to comment on a new study examining which foods can be the most addictive. Topping the list: pizza, French fries, chocolate, chips, cookies, ice cream, cake, soda, bacon and cheese. Although not all foods have the potential to be addictive, "it is critical to understand which ones do," said Robinson, who was not involved in the study, told CNN. "We are all pressed for time, and food is becoming more and more available," but we need to think about…

NPR's "Hidden Brain" program took a look at the science of compassion in a program featuring Professor of Psychology Scott Plous and the "Day of Compassion" exercise that he leads in his social psychology courses at Wesleyan and in his Social Psychology MOOC on Coursera. "Scott radiates kindness," said host and science correspondent Shankar Vedantam in introducing Plous. More than 250,000 students from around the world signed up for the first run of Plous' MOOC. The course capstone was the Day of Compassion exercise in which "students had to spend one day being deliberately kind and generous toward others. Scott asked them to notice how these actions…

2016 Patricelli Center Seed Grant Winners Announced

Barth, Patalano Co-Author Paper on How Numeracy Affects Risky Decision Making

Wilkins, Alumni Author New Paper on Threat of Racial Progress to Whites

Plous Named Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science

Wesleyan Launches First-Ever Creative Writing Specialization on Coursera

Juhasz, Students Teach Word Recognition Workshop at Green Street TLC

Loui, Jung ’16, Alumni Authors of Article in Frontiers in Psychology

Weissman Discusses Mental Health Care as Panelist

Juhasz, Alumni Published in Behavior Research Methods

Wesleyan MOOCs Topic of Academic (Technology) Roundtable

Robinson Tells CNN About Addictive Foods

Plous and the Science of Compassion Featured on NPR