Faculty & Student Research
Faculty and student research
Psychology faculty at 微密圈 are dedicated teachers, mentors, and scholars who help students explore the science of human behavior through both classroom learning and hands-on research. Their work spans a wide range of areas within psychological science, creating opportunities for students to engage deeply with the field while developing the skills needed for graduate study, careers, and lifelong learning.
Research and scholarship
Faculty in the Psychology Department are active scholars whose work spans diverse areas of psychological science. They publish widely, present nationally and internationally, secure research funding, and advance ethical and open scientific practices.
Student research opportunities
Students are integral to our research culture. Through close faculty mentorship, collaborative projects, and summer research opportunities, students gain hands-on experience and often contribute to conference presentations and scholarly publications.
Explore 微密圈 Psychology research labs
Professor Hassan Lopez鈥檚 lab explores the psychobiology of empathy and altruism, behavioral pharmacology (the effects of drugs on behavior), positive and negative effects of cannabinoids on brain and behavior, and sex differences and hormonal factors. The research group combines behavioral neuroscience, psychopharmacology, and neuroendocrinology, often using animal models to understand how brain chemistry shapes social behavior.
Professor Lauren Berger鈥檚 research group conducts studies on work-life balance, gender role norms, and the well-being of working mothers, with a focus on how family and workplace demands affect satisfaction and mental health. They have also researched attitudes toward traditional and nontraditional parenting roles and how gender expectations shape family experiences. More recently, the lab has examined the impact of COVID-19 on children and adolescents, including the emergence of PANDAS-like symptoms.
Professor Casey Schofield鈥檚 lab focuses on mental health stigma. Particular research areas of interest include (1) how stigma operates in the lives of patients with psychological disorders, with a focus on anxiety and the perinatal context and (2) addressing measurement challenges that present when assessing sensitive topics like stigma. Students in the lab gain exposure to the fundamentals of stigma science, including foundational theoretical work that defines stigma and how it operates in the context of mental health and the mechanics of conducting experiments and analyzing data.
Professor Stephanie Vaughan鈥檚 lab conducts research in cognitive psychology, focusing on how memory, attention, and learning processes work. The lab examines topics such as testing effects, test-potentiated learning, proactive and retroactive interference, and the factors that influence how people retain and recall information. The lab also studies how principles from memory and attention research can be applied to improve teaching and learning in educational settings.
Professor Pablo Gomez鈥檚 research group studies visual and tactile perception, decision dynamics, cognitive modeling, and statistical approaches to cognition. Projects involve reaction time tasks, eye-tracking, tactile perception, Bayesian analysis, simulations, and model building. These studies can help us understand other aspects of cognition, like reading, how we evaluate evidence, attention, consciousness, and many other topics.
Professor Denise Evert鈥檚 research group studies the hemispheric specialization of cognitive function with a focus on attentional and emotional processing using divided-visual field computerized experiments. The lab studies questions like:
In what way does hemispheric specialization of function affect the processing of faces? How are these effects mediated by emotional face expression, orientation of the face, the viewer鈥檚 emotional state, and the medium of presentation?
When we select information to pay attention to, what happens to the information that we ignore? Can emotional regulation strategies modify attentional capture from unattended information?
Professor Lisa Chalik鈥檚 lab studies the development of social cognition. The lab runs a number of studies with children ages 2 to 12 years old, largely focused on testing how children navigate the social world. The research in the lab includes studies on how children think about social groups, how they expect people to interact with one another, and how they think about morality.
Professor Leigh Wilton鈥檚 research group aims to better understand how members of both marginalized (e.g., people of color) and non-marginalized (e.g., White people) groups 鈥� as well as people whose identities span categories (e.g., biracial people) 鈥� engage with these issues, and in so doing, to help individuals, groups, and society benefit from the diversity of human experience. The lab has focused on the perception of diversity messages in organizations, how adults perceive children鈥檚 understanding of social identity, and how multiracial parents process racial/ethnic identity.
Professor Erica Wojcik鈥檚 research group explores what babies learn during the first few years of life and how this learning happens. Some of the current projects involve studying how interactions between parents and children change across development to facilitate word learning. Others examine how the structures of language and music relate to each other in the songs that infants hear. Finally, other projects look at what children learn from storybooks that are read to them in various settings.
Professor Sheldon Solomon鈥檚 lab studies the psychological function of self-esteem and the effects of human awareness of death on thoughts, feelings, and behavior. The lab group examines how people manage the anxiety associated with death by embracing cultural worldviews. The research also explores how mortality concerns shape phenomena such as prejudice, politics, religion, relationships, self-esteem, and responses to major societal threats.
Professor Jess Sullivan鈥檚 research group studies how kids learn about 鈥� and from 鈥� the world. The lab鈥檚 current research program is focused on three primary areas:
- Understanding how we use linguistic structure to learn about numbers.
- Understanding how we learn about and interpret non-numerical natural language.
- Understanding how we learn about the social world.
Professor Rebecca Johnson鈥檚 research group focuses on the cognitive processes underlying reading in (1) normal skilled readers (2) children developing the skill of reading, and (3) individuals with stroke-induced reading disorders. Despite the fact that most of us are quite good at reading, the mental processes involved are highly complex. Using a variety of experimental techniques, including word naming tasks, lexical decision tasks, and eye-tracking, we can better understand how the human mind encodes and makes sense of arbitrary symbols used in written communication.
Professor Daniel Peterson鈥檚 research group studies human memory to better understand why we remember and forget what we do. The lab focuses on three areas:
- Eyewitness Memory 鈥� We鈥檝e explored the relationship between confidence and accuracy in eyewitness memory and how stress impacts this relationship.
- Memory Retrieval 鈥� We know that when something is recalled once, it鈥檚 easier to recall a second time. We鈥檙e trying to understand exactly how and why this happens.
- Education 鈥� When students take a practice test, performance on the actual test improves. We want to better understand what kinds of tests help students maximize their retention of information.
Professor Dom Vuvan鈥檚 lab group researches musical structure, learning, and expertise, and the interactions between music and language. Students learn about interdisciplinary research in music cognition, collect behavioural and brain data from humans, and learn to use auditory signal processing, recording, and production software.
Professor Mark Rye鈥檚 lab studies positive psychology, which is the scientific study of strengths and virtues that enable individuals, groups, and organizations to flourish. The research group focuses on how gratitude, forgiveness, kindness, and other positive psychology topics impact mental health. Lab members have the opportunity to assist with many aspects of research project development and implementation, including conducting literature reviews, designing studies, developing scales and surveys, running intervention programs, recruiting participants, collecting and analyzing data, and reviewing journal articles.
Professor Harrison Schmitt鈥檚 lab uses a variety of research methods to study the psychology of social justice issues. The current research focuses on three pressing issues that disproportionately impact communities of color and low-income communities. These include:
- environmental justice issues like chronic water contamination and climate change,
- financial debt like student loans, medical debt, and credit cards, and
- policing and mass incarceration. Students gain experience with conducting mixed-methods research by analyzing qualitative and quantitative data to gain insights into the psychology of social justice issues.
Professor Rachel Mann-Rosan oversees 微密圈's Snoezelen Room, which is a multisensory therapeutic space used for teaching, research, and promoting mental health. Professor Mann-Rosan鈥檚 clinical research focuses on developmental disabilities, autism spectrum disorders, Alzheimer's disease and related dementias, and the assessment and treatment of suicidality. The work aims to better understand and support individuals with developmental, cognitive, and mental health challenges.
Professor Corinne Moss-Racusin鈥檚 research group studies stigma against individuals in non-monogamous relationships, with a focus on how this stigma manifests against non-monogamous parents. The lab also explores people鈥檚 perceptions of families and the presence of stigma against non-nuclear families. Other projects involve discrimination faced by women in traditionally male fields, discrimination faced by men in traditionally female fields, how cisgenderism leads to stigma targeting queer people and their communities, and gender bias in academia.
Professor Luc LaFreniere鈥檚 lab researches new psychotherapies by offering them through brief interventions and smartphone technology. The main aims are to improve interventions for anxiety disorders and depression, examine how rewarding experiences may combat both, and better understand how positive emotions function in mental disorders. The key focus is mental health practice related to activities associated with positive emotion, feelings of competence, or personal meaning. Essentially, the lab is trying to help people develop skills for better engaging with rewarding experiences.
Professor Abby Kleinsmith鈥檚 research focuses on three main questions underlying cognitive psychology.
- Does where we look correlate with what we attend to? (the mind-eye link)
- How does expert perception differ from novice perception? (perceptual expertise)
- How does the brain encode and retrieve music? (music cognition)
Students in the Visual Cognition Lab gain skills in hands-on eye tracker experience, critical reading and thinking, literature review, stimulus creation, experimental design, data cleaning and analysis, data visualization, and manuscript preparation.