Psychology

Neil Lutsky, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology, published a chapter, Internationalizing the Personality Psychology Course, with Ashwini Ashokkumar, University of Texas, in the book Internationalizing the Teaching of Psychology, edited by Rich, Gielen, and Takooshian (2017).

Ken Abrams, Associate Professor of Psychology, presented a paper co-authored by Leslie Mei '17, Cathy Chen '17, Elissa Koele '17, Joshua Kwan '17, Zach Montes '17, and Marcus Van Ginkel '17 titled, The Effects of Alcohol on Heartbeat Perception: Implications for Anxiety, at the 8th International Conference on Health Psychology in Havana, Cuba.

Julie Neiworth, Laurence McKinley Gould Professor of the Natural Sciences and Psychology, together with alumnus Kate Wagner (psychology '2016), and current students Alexandria Carlsen (psychology 2017) and Sarah Min (biology 2018) presented their research on dimensional category shifting by toddlers, monkeys, and adults on Saturday, May 27, 2017 at the Association for Psychological Science (APS) annual national conference in Boston MA.

Julie Neiworth, Laurence McKinley Gould Professor of the Natural Sciences and Psychology, published the article "Artificial grammar learning in cotton top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus) in varying stimulus contexts" in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, with co-authors Justin London, professor of music and cognitive studies, Michael Flynn, professor of linguistics, and alumni Dee Dee Rupert (2011) and Owen Alldritt (2012). The article is available online March 9, 2017, and will be in print in the May issue of the journal.

Julie Neiworth, Laurence McKinley Gould Professor of the Natural Sciences and Psychology, received a $430,950 grant from the National Institutes of Health for a three-year research project to study the onset of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). In her project, Neiworth and undergraduate student researchers will collect cognitive and behavioral data from a troop of cotton-top tamarin monkeys. They hope to distinguish “natural” aging-related declines in learning and thinking from declines due to Alzheimer’s-like changes in the brain. In addition to working with up to 50 undergraduate researchers during summers, winter and spring breaks, and the three academic years covered by the grant, Neiworth will track beta amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, two major markers of AD, in monkeys post mortem.

Sarah Meerts, Assistant Professor of Psychology, published a review article with collaborator Fay A. Guarraci (Southwestern University) in Current Sexual Health Reports titled "Does Practice Make Perfect? Sexual Experience and Psychomotor Stimulants Influence Female Sexual Motivation Through Medial Preoptic Area Dopamine." She also recently published an article with student co-authors Kelly Anderson '13, Molly Farry-Thorn '13, Elliott Johnson '13, and Lisa Taxier '13 in Physiology & Behavior that describes the effect of prepubertal ovariectomy on motivation and reward for mating in female rats.

Julia Strand, Assistant Professor of Psychology, gave an invited talk for the Washington University in St. Louis Psychology department's division of Brain, Behavior, and Cognition. The talk was called Integrating contextual and perceptual information during spoken word recognition" and described research that was conducted with Carleton students Violet Brown '17, Hunter Brown '17, Joseph Slote '16, Jeff Berg '14, Jonathon Rowe '14, Allie Cooperman '14, and Andrea Simenstand '14.

Adam Putnam, Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology, was recently selected by the Association for Psychological Science as a 2016 Rising Star. The award is an early career award "in recognition of innovative work that has already advanced the field, signaling great potential for continued contributions to psychological science."

Neil Lutsky, William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology, published a chapter, "Sharing a Full Measure of Psychology: Teaching the Introductory Course to Strengthen Quantitative Reasoning," in Dunn and Hard (Eds.), Thematic Approaches for Teaching Introductory Psychology (Cengage).

Julia Strand, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Violet Brown '17, and Hunter Brown '17, presented research at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Boston, Massachusetts. The project, "Keep listening: Grammatical context reduces but does not eliminate activation of unexpected words" used eye-tracking to evaluate how listeners incorporate contextual information during spoken word recognition.