Research

Faculty Members and Their Research Interests

Maureen Babineau
Visiting Instructor in Psychology and Education
Adolescent psychology; adult development as it relates to understanding first generation, nontraditional college students.

Kathy Binder
Associate Professor of Psychology
Cognitive psychology and language processing; the role of context in reading and comprehension in skilled reading behavior; the roles of phonology and context in the acquisition of reading in adult illiterate populations; language processing in special populations such as Williams syndrome.

Joseph Cohen
Class of 1929 Dr. Virginia Apgar Professor of Psychology and Dean of Studies;
Vision and visual perception; neuropsychology of perception and action; visual illusions; color perception; perception and visual art.

Francine Deutsch (leave/year)
Professor of Psychology and Education
International study of gender and domestic labor; paid domestic labor; equally-sharing parenting; motherhood, work, and family balance; the US child care system including the career trajectories of preschool teachers/child care workers.

Amber Douglas (leave/spring)
Assistant Professor of Psychology and Education
Clinical psychology and mental health issues focusing primarily on psychological trauma and related symptoms and aftermath; focus on psychology of ethnic minorities and people of color; coping and stress; cultural competence; psychology of racism, specifically its impact on targets.

KC Haydon
Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology
Attachment behavior and representations; romantic functioning; conflict and conflict resolution; close relationships as developmental contexts; how early and later experience shape social development across the lifespan.

Karen Hollis
Professor of Psychology and Education
Learning in nonhuman animals, specifically fish, lizards and insects; adaptive significance of Pavlovian conditioning.

Gail Hornstein
Professor of Psychology and Education
History of American psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis; boundaries between academic and popular psychology; qualitative methodology, especially phenomenology; narratives of madness; psychiatric survivor movement.

Sarah Knapp
Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology
Stigmatization of individuals with cancer based on dimensions of social stigma (e.g., visibility, controllability of onset, etc.); using educational interventions to reduce the stigmatization of lung cancer; the use of metaphors in describing individuals with physical illness.

Sandra Lawrence (leave/fall)
Professor of Psychology and Education
Multicultural teaching and learning in K-12 and college settings; qualitative research in education; whiteness and racism in schools; development of racial identity in young adults; teacher education; technological learning with Web 2.0 technology.

Will Millard (leave/year)
Professor of Psychology and Education
Behavioral pharmacology and experimental psychopathology.

Char Morrow 
Co-Director, SummerMath & Lecturer in Psychology and Education
Psychology of women; gender and diversity issues in mathematics education; effective mathematics learning and teaching; creation of effective residential multicultural learning communities for high school women; the mathematics of symmetry.

Becky Wai-Ling Packard
Associate Professor of Psychology and Education
Educational Psychology, focusing on motivation and identity; the influence of mentoring on the retention of students in science at the K-12 and college-level, especially women of color and first generation college students; the transition between high school and post-secondary education or work for low-income students; community-based learning partnerships.

Robert Polewan 
Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology and Education
Behavioral and cognitive neuroscience; learning and memory; face processing and recognition.

Patricia Ramsey
Professor of Psychology and Education
Early social development; children's responses to racial, cultural and social-class differences; development of multicultural curricula and multiculturally-oriented teacher-education programs; early friendships and the development of children's social interaction skills; ethnic identity of adopted teens.

Lenore Reilly Carlisle
Assistant Professor of Psychology and Education
Teacher preparation; peer-coaching models in pre-service teacher preparation in the US and South Africa; school/university/community partnerships in teacher preparation; social justice education and student achievement.

Pat Romney
Visiting Associate Professor of Psychology and Education
Women of color active in the 1970’s women’s movement; recruitment and retention of faculty of color; organizational diversity and change; achievement of students of color; positive psychology; aging and the family.

Robert Shilkret
Norma Cutts DaFoe Professor of Psychology
Adjustment to the college environment as related to thoughts about and relations with parents; psychoanalytic psychology, especially as it relates to developmental psychology.

Araceli Valle (leave/fall)
Assistant Professor of Psychology and Education
Cognitive development in sociocultural contexts; beliefs about knowledge; analogical and deductive reasoning; connections between types of educational background and ideas about the nature of science and the value of scientific reasoning; parent-child conversations as contexts for development of a scientific worldview.