Psychology Department

Faculty

Related Faculty & Post-Docs

Core Faculty

	Lisa Feldman Barrett, Professor (Ph.D. University of Waterloo, 1992)—Emotion. The structure of emotion. The influence of language and conceptual knowledge in emotion perception and emotion experience. Individual variation in affective processing. Sex differences in emotion.
	Hiram Brownell, Professor (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University, 1978)—Cognitive neuropsychology: how injury to various parts of the brain can selectively impair linguistic and cognitive ability; language: theory of mind, discourse, narrative, and lexical semantics; methodology.
	Donnah Canavan, Associate Professor (Ph.D. Columbia University, 1969)—Effects of shared enthusiasm; the development of individual differences: fear of success, healthy, and conventional orientations to success; psychological separateness and narcissism; psychology of self-esteem and of adult children of alcoholics.
	Randolph Easton, Professor (Ph.D. University of New Hampshire, 1974)—Perceptual and cognitive processes; spatial representation and imagery; relations among the perceptual systems; visual dominance; sensory substitution in the handicapped.
	Jon Horvitz, Associate Professor (Ph.D. University of California, Santa Barbara, 1991)—The neurochemistry of learning and motivation; dopamine and habit learning; parkinson's disease, schizophrenia. We examine simple learning in rats and genetic knockout mice to understand the role of dopamine activity within its various brain target sites in specific aspects of learning.
	Elizabeth Kensinger, Assistant Professor (Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003)—Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience: The effect of emotional content on memory; specifically, the cognitive and neural mechanisms through which emotion influences the vividness and accuracy of memory, and how these influences change across the adult lifespan; research questions are investigated through behavioral testing of young and older adults and functional neuroimaging (fMRI).
	Ramsay Liem, Professor (Ph.D. University of Rochester, 1970)—Community Psychology (intergenerational transmission of political trauma, human rights and mental health); Asian American/Korean American Studies (Asian American history and ethnic identity formation).
	Michael Moore, Associate Professor (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1978)—Children's participation in organized sport: parent-child interactions, emotional development; Cognitive development: memory organization, children's understanding of the "rules of the game," automatic processing.
	Gilda Morelli, Associate Professor (Ph.D. University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 1987)—The social, cultural, and economic circumstances related to young children's experiences, learning and development, with an interest in children and families in US and African communities. Domestic and international social policies and programs for young children and families.
	Michael Numan, Professor (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1973)—Neurobiology of motivation, emotion, and social behavior; specifically neurobiology of parental behavior in rodents and the effects of hormones and experience on the relevant hypothalamic, limbic, and striatal circuits.
	Gorica Petrovich, Assistant Professor (Ph.D. University of Southern California, 1997)—Neurobiology of motivation and feeding behavior; functional organization of the brain systems mediating environmental control of food intake, specifically interactions between the amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and hypothalamus; modulation of hunger and satiety mechanisms by learning and stress.
	Karen Rosen, Associate Professor (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1984)—Social and emotional development during infancy and early childhood; parent-child attachment relationships; sibling relationships.
	James A. Russell, Professor (Ph.D. UCLA, 1974)—Emotion. The expression and recognition of emotion through faces. Children's understanding of emotion and the development of emotional experience. Cultural influences on emotion. The distinction between mood and emotion and scientific taxonomies of each.
	M. Jeanne Sholl, Professor (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University, 1982)—The organization and use of spatial memory in the service of navigation, the applicability of animal models of navigation to humans, wayfinding in natural environments, individual differences in large-scale spatial ability, the role of different cognitive systems in mediating spatial behavior at different spatial scales.
	Scott Slotnick, Assistant Professor (Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley, 1998)—Cognitive Neuroscience: Neural mechanisms of visual memory; control regions and sensory effects associated with retrieval of visual memories; subjective experience during memory retrieval; cortical substrates associated with visual feature-based perception/attention.
	Michael Smyer, Professor (Ph.D. Duke University, 1977)—Co-Director, Center on Aging and Work at Boston College. Dr. Smyer's research and teaching focus on adult development and aging, with special attention to the impact of the contexts of aging (e.g., workplaces; nursing homes). In addition, he has written extensively on aging and mental health, particularly the policy aspects of this area. As Co-director of the Center on Aging and Work, Dr. Smyer focuses on the development of evidence-based practices to enhance the individual and organizational effectiveness of twenty-first century workplaces.
	Maya Tamir, Assistant Professor (Ph. D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004)—Emotion regulation; Cognition, motivation and emotion; Social cognition; Individual differences in emotion and information processing. The interpersonal and intrapersonal functions of emotions and their potential variation across individuals. Learning about the utility of emotions. The role of hedonic and instrumental functions of emotions in emotion regulation.
	Joseph Tecce, Associate Professor (Ph.D. Catholic University, 1961)—Psychophysiology of health, including body languages as indicators of emotions and stress and cognitive-behavioral methods to control stress.
	Ellen Winner, Professor (Ph.D. Harvard University, 1978)—Developmental psychology of the arts in typical and gifted children; cognition and learning in the arts; transfer of learning from arts to non-arts learning.

Related Faculty and Post-Docs

	Ali Banuazizi, Research Professor (Ph.D. Yale University, 1968)—Political cultures of the Middle East; comparative study of religion, ethnicity, and politics in the Middle East and Central Asia; conceptions of equality and social justice; politics of martyrdom.
	Tamara Bond, Visiting Assistant Professor (Ph.D. Boston College, 2006)—Cognitive Science & Behavioral Neuroscience: Multimodal integration and enhancement; errors in multimodal integration and the formation of illusions or hallucinations; the impact of peripheral and central nervous system impairment on perception and auditory-visual integration; sensory impairments and daily functioning.
	Judith Dempewolff, Part-Time Faculty—Ph.D., Clinical Psychologist, Private Practice. Psychology of Gender and Abnormal Psychology. Clinical issues including eating disorders, use of meditation and awareness techniques as therapeutic tools, holistic health.
	Peter Gray, Research Professor (Ph.D. Rockefeller University, 1972)—Children's play (particularly age-mixed play); self-directed learning; evolutionary psychology, developmental psychology, educational psychology, general psychology.
	Gene Heyman, Adjunct Associate Professor
	Christina Leclerc, Postdoctoral Fellow (Ph.D. North Carolina State University, 2006)—Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience: Understanding the normal aging process from cognitive affective, and neuroscience perspectives; specifically, the effect of emotion on executive processes such as information processing, social judgment, and decision-making across the adult lifespan; research questions are investigated through behavioral, eyetracking, and functional neuroimaging (fMRI) testing of young and older adults.
	Joan Lucariello, Affiliated Faculty, Professor in Lynch School of Education (Ph.D., City University of New York Graduate Center)—Cognitive development and its relation to learning; language development; cultural psychology; sociocultural effects on cognition, learning, and learning environments.
	Kevin McIntyre, Adjunct Assistant Professor (Ph.D. Saint Louis University, 2007)—Social Psychology: social comparison; self-regulation; social cognition; use of self-victimization following threat; self-regulatory capacity and risky health behavior.
	Lauren Moo, Part-Time Faculty (M.D. Tufts University School of Medicine, 1995)—Neurologist and Cognitive Neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Clinical focus on patients with epilepsy and with cognitive or behavioral disorders. Research interests include the neural basis of language processing using neuropsychological, behavioral, and functional neuroimaging methodologies.
	Marie Natoli, Part-Time Faculty
	Marilee Ogren, Part-Time Faculty (Ph.D. University of Washington, 1979)—Primate visual system, developmental neurobiology, developmental disorders in humans. I do not have a research laboratory. I teach, write, and edit. In addition to teaching neuroscience and physiology at Boston College, I teach scientific writing at MIT.
	Michael G. Pratt, Affiliated Faculty Member, Professor of Organization Studies in the Carroll School of Management (Ph.D. University of Michigan)—Organizational, professional, and non-work identities and identification; intuition; distributed work; sensemaking; meaning of work.
	David Smith, Part-Time Faculty (PsyD, Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, 1995)—Clinical Psychology: child, adolescent, and family psychotherapy; adolescent conduct disorders; treatment for trauma survivors and victims of violence; stress management; cognitive and personality assessment; community mental health services.
	Amy Tishelman, Part-Time Faculty (Ph.D. West Virginia University, 1988)—Development and psychopathology; developmental perspectives on childhood trauma; school function and adjustment in traumatized children; forensic and clinical evaluation of sexual abuse and other forms of maltreatment; age and gender differences in the expression of trauma; the expression of trauma in children diagnosed with developmental disabilities; family and interpersonal violence.
	Sherri Widen, Postdoctoral Fellow (Ph.D. Boston College, 2005)—Emotion and Development: Children’s understanding of emotion and how that understanding changes through the preschool years and beyond. Cue to emotion, label use, and category breadth each play a role in how children understand emotion.