The Department of Psychological Science is home to an outstanding 25-member faculty, representing several specialties including developmental, social, health, biological, clinical, and community psychology. United by an overarching interest in human adaptation in various sociocultural and developmental contexts, the faculty share a strong commitment to research that has the potential for application to important societal problems. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to research problems is also characteristic of our faculty, reflecting the core values of the School of Social Ecology. These values are reflected in the research interests of the faculty, which include:
- Social development and developmental transitions across the life course
- The impact of day care and other social environments on children
- The challenges of integrating work and family roles
- The cultural contexts of emotion, cognition, and behavior
- Personality and psychophysiological processes that underlie health and illness
- The social, community and cultural contexts of anger, aggression, and violence
- Neural bases of mathematical and language learning
- The mental and physical health effects of life stress, including societal stressors such as economic downturns and natural disasters
- Perceptions of and responses to health and environmental risks
- Loneliness and social support in later life
- Decision making at the end of life
- The psychobiology of stress and its role in health and disease
- Impacts of increasing Internet use on people's participation in local environments and social networks
- Ecological analyses of human development, behavior, and well-being
- Contextual influences on the effectiveness of cross-disciplinary collaborative teams
- Psychological science and practice as it interacts with the legal system
See individual faculty pages for more information on research interests
The research of faculty members and graduate students combines laboratory methods with more naturalistic approaches in order to achieve an optimal blend of experimental control and generalizability. The natural settings in which faculty members conduct their studies include schools, worksites, homes, community centers, hospitals and medical clinics, psychiatric facilities, and women's shelters. This work has been conducted, moreover, not only in the United States but also in other countries. Thus students who pursue their studies in the Department have the opportunity to gain experience investigating human behavior in clinical and nonclinical populations, in a diverse region of the country as well as in diverse cultures, and in field as well as laboratory settings. Moreover, several of our faculty members have received campus-wide awards for excellence in teaching, in mentoring undergraduate researchers, and in training doctoral students to become effective teachers.
Departmental faculty also enjoy an excellent track record of attracting extramural support for their research, with an average of approximately $1.5 million in annual funding over the last 5 years. Extramural funding for the current fiscal year is over $2.1 in direct costs; multi-year awards to departmental faculty currently exceed $12 million. Current sources of extramural funding for over 20 active grants include the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute of Child Health and Development, National Institute on Aging, National Cancer Institute, National Science Foundation, the American Heart Association, the American Medical Association, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.