SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
Psychology Research
All students in the psychology program complete a 12-credit research core that culminates in an original research project.
Fall 2003 Psych 431w Class Projects
Spring 2004 Psych 431 Class Projects
Many students also collaborate with faculty in one of the eight full-time research laboratories.
PSYCHOLOGY LABORATORY
The Psychology program maintains an eleven-room laboratory in Lawrence Hall for faculty and student teaching and research. The Lab is equipped with computers and research equipment including a 64-channel ERP system for the collection of brain waves.
The lab is staffed by approximately fifteen to twenty psychology students each semester who are conducting independent research or work study. Students interested in working in the Lab may contact any of the lab directors listed below or or e-mail jdt107@psu.edu.
FACULTY RESEARCH
Clinical Laboratory: Dr. Eric W. Corty
- The role of classical conditioning in relapse to drug abuse.
- Dual diagnosis (patients with substance abuse and other mental illness).
- The reliability, validity, and development of psychological measures.
Cognitive Laboratory: Dr. Dawn G. Blasko
- Psycholinguistics: How do people use and understand language? I'm especially interested in nonliteral language such as metaphor, irony, and idioms.
- Working Memory capacity: Do people with greater working memory capacity process language differently?
- Problem solving and Creativity: How is creativity and problem solving related?
- Applied Cognition: Training spatial skills on the Web with Kath Holliday-Darr in Engineering.
Developmental Laboratory: Dr. Charisse Nixon
- Children's social cognition.
- Young children's theory of mind.
- Family experiences and children's socioemotional understanding.
- Relational aggression.
- CASS project
Human Factors Laboratory: Jennifer Trich Kremer
Current research topics include:
- Web site design and usability evaluation
- Studying individual work environments
- Driving and distractions
- Employee satisfaction evaluations
Perception Laboratory: Dr. Clare Porac
- Research on differences between left and right handed people
- Research on hand switching preference
- Cross-cultural comparisons of hand preference
- Research on visual illusion
Physiological Laboratory: Dr. Victoria A. Kazmerski
- The examination of memory, language, and attention in both normal functioning and clinical populations using the recording of event-related brain potentials (ERPs)
Social Laboratory: Dr. Carl A. Kallgren
- The mediators of ethical judgments regarding the use of human and non-human subjects in scientific research.
- Investigating the environmental context and short- and long-term psychopathological consequences of parental death in childhood.
- CORE Center for Organizational Research and Evaluation.
- gender in spatial cognition
- viewer and object based mental rotation
- evolutionary psychology
Special projects
COR: CourseWare for Observational Research
An interactive multimedia program to teach observational research methods using state-of-the-art digital video technology. It contained lessons, labs and a guided case study. This program is used at Penn State and elsewhere to teach systemmatic observation. For more information contact project directors Dr. Dawn Blasko or Dr. Victoria Kazmerski
VIZ: visualization assessment and training website
Viz is a website dedicated to the teaching and research in spatial cognition. It contains several interactive modules that allow users to test and improve their sptail abilities. This is an interdisciplinary project that has involved students and faculty from psychology, engineering, communications and management information systems. For more information contact the project directors Dr. Dawn Blasko or Mrs. Holliday-Darr.