Tuesday, January 3, 2017

January 2017


Awards & Accomplishments
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Professor Mark Snyder, McKnight Presidential Chair in Psychology, and his research on self-monitoring and social chameleons are featured in the article "Catch Us If You Can" in the online science magazine "Nautilus".  Here is a link to the article.

Professor Richard Lee will serve as Chair-Elect from 2017-2019 and then serve as Chair of the Society for Research on Child Development Asian Caucus from 2019-2021. Professor Lee is one of the ten founding members of the Caucus which began in 2005 and was formally launched as part of SRCD in 2007.

Professor Richard Lee was also part of a CLA-MPR panel discussion on ways to move beyond stigma in mental health with MPR News host Tom Weber. The dicussion can be listened to here.

Professor Angus MacDonald, faculty in CSPR, PIB/BP and CAB, begins this month (January) as the Incoming Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology. The Journal is APA’s flagship for psychopathology research. Professor MacDonald will have overall responsibility for the editorial board and the direction of the journal during this momentous time for psychopathology.

Mary Panos (Social Psychology Doctoral Student) was named a 2016 recipient of a 2016 APA Dissertation Research Award.

Jillian Fish (Counseling Psychology Doctoral Student) was an honoree at the American Indian Student Cultural Center's annual Honoring American Indian Women's Reception for her outstanding work in Native American communities.

Friday, December 2, 2016

December 2016


Administrative Updates & Announcements
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We are pleased to welcome a new staff member to our Central Office – Siobhan Swiderski. Siobhan is replacing Marina McCuskey, who is now working with the Chair’s Office. Stop by when you can, and help us welcome Siobhan to the Department!

Awards & Accomplishments
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As part of the "Give to the Max 2016" campaign, Professor Mark Snyder, McKnight Presidential Chair in Psychology, was interviewed for Access Minnesota (a program aired on radio stations across the state) on the psychology of giving and volunteering. Here’s a link to the interview.

Professor Bob Krueger was named a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher, 2016, in the field of Psychiatry/Psychology.

"A Guide to Data Analysis in R Commander", by Viann Nguyen-Feng and Mark A. Stellmack is available for free at stellmack.psych.umn.edu. R Commander is a point-and-click interface to the R programming language that is comparable in functionality to SPSS. This guide provides instructions for downloading and installing R Commander and for performing basic statistical analyses. It is aimed at those who have completed an introductory statistics course, but it is intended to serve as a general-purpose reference for those looking to quickly navigate the quirks of R Commander.

Graduated
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Congratulations to our recent Department of Psychology Ph. D graduate!

Joseph Vitriol 
Area: Social
Advisors: Mark Snyder and Eugene Borgida
Dissertation: The (In)egalitarian Self: On the Motivated Rejection of Implicit Racial Bias

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

November 2016

Awards & Accomplishments


Professor of Psychology and Law, Eugene Borgida, and Richard Zweigenhaft, Guilford College professor of psychology, co-edited a book titled ”Collaboration in Psychological Science: Behind the Scenes.” In addition to the Introduction and Conclusion that he and his co-author wrote, Borgida is the author of one of the chapters, “It takes a village: Interdisciplinary research collaboration in political psychology.” Thirty-five psychologists, who have collaborated extensively with a wide range of scholars from multiple disciplines over the course of their careers, wrote the other 20 chapters. The essays explore the many benefits of collaborating, as well as the pitfalls that can lead to difficult or even nightmare collaborative experiences. Best practices for collaborative scholarship are identified and discussed. Peter Salovey, the president of Yale University, wrote the foreward to the book, which has been published by Worth Publishers (a division of Macmillan Learning).

Emeritus Professor, Gloria Leon, was featured in an article in the Minnesota Daily. The article focuses on her studies of groups of people in isolation to gauge the compatibility of astronaut teams. The article can be found here.

Graduate Student Jeremy Harper received a Travel Award from the Society for Research in Psychopathology at the 2016 conference in Baltimore, Maryland, for his poster presentation titled "Testing the effects of adolescent alcohol use on adult conflict-related theta dynamics.” This work was conducted with Regents Professor Bill Iacono and Steve Malone.

Ashley Wright, a post-baccalaureate lab coordinator supervised by CSPR Graduate student Sam Cooper and Associate Professor Shmuel Lissek won a poster award at this years Society of Psychophysiological Research (SPR) conference, held here in Minneapolis, for a poster titled “High Trait Fear is Associated with Over-generalization and Impaired Inhibition of Classically Conditioned Fear.”

Graduated


Congratulations to our recent Department of Psychology Ph. D graduates!

Ian Ramsay
Area: CSPR
Advisor: Angus MacDonald
Dissertation: Neural Impact of Cognitive Remediation for Schizophrenia in a Randomized Controlled Trial

Lovey Walker
Area: Counseling
Advisors: Moin Syed and Richard Lee

Dissertation: Processes of Identity Integration: An Examination of Sports & Ethnic Identities

Grants


Regents Professor Matt McGue was awarded a 5-year continuation of a R01 grant that was originally awarded in 1992 from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.  The continuation is in the amount of 3.1 million dollars, in order to continue a prospective cotwin control study on adolescent drinking and midlife outcomes.

Professor Richard Lee is part of an interdisciplinary team that was awarded one of the University's Grand Challenge Research Grants.


The proposed project - Reminders for Readiness (R4R) – is to develop, pilot and study the implementation and initial impact of a universally available, low cost, personalized e- communication (text-messaging) system to support parents in promoting their children’s healthy development. The immediate objectives are to 1) establish strong partnerships with communities and stakeholders; 2) lay the parent recruitment infrastructure necessary to launch a sustainable system; 3) develop and launch relevant, culturally-responsive content for general messaging and text tailored to individual child needs; and 4) analyze the implementation of the partnerships, e- communication system, and pilot messaging to evaluate this partnership approach and the impact of this platform on infants and toddlers (0 – 3 years old), and their parents. We propose to start with messaging about well-child visits, immunizations, screening and service-venue use - outcomes that can be readily assessed, allowing a test of the utility of the service.

Thursday, September 1, 2016

September 2016

Awards & Accomplishments


Emeritus Professor Bruce Overmier, along with his co-author Robert Murison, had their paper “Restoring psychology’s role in peptic ulcer” selected as the recipient of the 2016 George A. Miller Award for an Outstanding Recent Article on General Psychology.  Both authors will be invited to present an address based on their paper at next year's APA Convention in Washington.

Professor Deniz S. Ones was named a Fellow of Division 8 of the American Psychology Association - the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP).  SPSP fellowship signifies SPSP members with longstanding contribution to the field of Personality and Social Psychology. 

  Graduate Student Jack Kostal in our Industrial/Organizational Psychology area (Deniz S. Ones & Nathan R. Kuncel, co-advisors), was awarded the prestigious 2016 Meredith P. Crawford Fellowship in I/O Psychology from the Human Resources Research Organization (HumRRO); each year, the $12,000 fellowship is awarded to one dissertation-stage I/O psychology doctoral candidate nation-wide who demonstrates exceptional research skills.


Graduate Students Brenton Wiernik & Jack Kostal in our Industrial/Organizational Psychology area (Deniz S. Ones & John P. Campbell and Deniz S. Ones & Nathan R. Kuncel, co-advisors, respectively), have received the Best Student Paper Award from the Midwest Academy of Management for their paper “Demographic Differences in Protean, Boundaryless, and Exploratory Career Orientations: A Comprehensive Meta-Analysis” The paper will be showcased during the annual meeting of the Midwest Academy of Management in Fargo, North Dakota Oct. 6 - Oct. 8.

Graduated


Congratulations to our recent Department of Psychology Ph. D graduates!

Allison Farrell
Area: Social
Advisors: Jeff Simpson & Alex Rothman
Dissertation: Behavioral, affective, cognitive, and physiological consequences of relational power during conflict

Leah Feuerstahler
Area: QPM
Advisor: Niels Waller
Dissertation: Exploring Alternate Latent Trait Metrics with the Filtered Monotonic Polynomial IRT Model

Grants


Associate Professor Shmuel Lissek was awarded a 5-year R01 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health in the amount of 2.1 million dollars to study the transdiagnostic relevance of neural mechanisms by which Pavlovian generalization of fear transfers to maladaptive generalized avoidance.