Department of Psychology
college of arts and sciences
Research News
Assistant Professor Gorica Petrovich has been awarded the 2012 Alan N. Epstein Research Award from the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior. This award honors an individual for a specific research discovery that has advanced the understanding of ingestive behavior. The letter of nomination states: “Gorica’s work combines cutting-edge behavioral analyses with high-resolution neuroanatomical techniques to provide unique insights into the way that external cues can influence feeding behavior through learning. This work is of high significance and novelty because it provides a rigorous experimental foundation for understanding how cognitive processes in the telencephalon can interface with circuits in the hypothalamus and hindbrain to control feeding behavior.” Gorica will be travelling to Zurich to accept the award and make a presentation on her research.
Shannon Snapp, Ph.D. 2010 and now a postdoctoral fellow at University of Arizona, has just published an article (with Boston College Assistant Professor Ehri Ryu) on body image resilience. She reports that a variety of factors contribute to positive body image in young women: high family support, low levels of perceived sociocultural pressure about the thin and beautiful ideal, rejection of the super-woman ideal, and active coping skills. Results can inform prevention of eating disorders and suggest interventions to improve body dissatisfaction and initial maladaptive eating practices.
Shannon Snapp, Laura Hensley-Choate, Ehri Ryu. A Body Image Resilience Model for First-Year College Women. Sex Roles, 2012; DOI: 10.1007/s11199-012-0163-1
The Psychology Department welcomes Dr. Hao Wu to the department. Dr. Wu, who specializes in the evaluation of statistical models in psychology, will join the quantitative area of the department as an Assistant Professor in September 2012.
Caroline Smith, graduate student in Alexa Veenema’s lab, has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for her research on the neural mechanisms regulating social novelty-seeking. Several human social disorders (e.g. autism) are characterized by impaired social novelty-seeking, but the neural mechanisms underlying social novelty-seeking are poorly understood. Caroline has developed a new behavioral test to study, for the first time, the neural network that mediates social novelty-seeking and the role of prosocial neuropeptides vasopressin and oxytocin in this network.
Events
Research in focus
Sara Cordes, assistant professor of psychology and principal investigator of the Infant and Child Cognition Lab, discusses some of the more than 20 research studies currently being conducted in the lab.