Updated for 2007-2008
We are encouraging students interested in empirical theses to consider working with faculty in their specialty areas. There are a number of advantages to working with members of the Psychology Department in their areas of interest, including getting expert advising, access to recent studies and assessment instruments, and the potential for later publication. Below are brief descriptions of the research interests of the faculty in the Department.
Click on the name to see that faculty member's description:
Helen BoucherAmy Bradfield Douglass
Rebecca Fraser-Thill
Todd Kahan
John Kelsey
Nancy S. Koven
Susan Langdon
Kathy Graff Low
Georgia Nigro
Michael Sargent
Krista Scottham
Helen Boucher
My work broadly concerns social influences on the self. Specific questions I have sought to answer include the following:
Cultural Psychology
1. How does culture influence the nature of self-knowledge and self- evaluation?2. How does culture shape the pursuit of uniqueness in identity?
The Relational Self
1. The self in relationships: What is it, and what impact does it have?2. Does defining the self in terms of close relationships serve a self-regulatory function?
Other Interests
1. Do broad theories about the stability vs. malleability of the self affect the relationship between self-knowledge and self-esteem?2. Does mortality salience exert effects on certain aspects of self-knowledge?
I am on leave for the Fall 2007 semester and will not be advising any senior theses during that period.
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Amy Bradfield Douglass
I have two broad areas of interest: law and memory distortion. The following list includes some questions I am currently interested in:
- Does feedback about the accuracy of eyewitness identification affect a witness’s willingness to make a subsequent identification?
- Do instructions to jurors affect decisions?
- Does the presence of an audience in a courtroom affect perceptions of a defendant?
- How does an eyewitness’s decision affect an investigator?
- How are witnesses who knew they would have to make an identification different from those who were surprised that they would have to make an identification?
- What kind of feedback to eyewitnesses can distort their memories?
- When are eyewitnesses most susceptible to social influence?
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Rebecca Fraser-Thill
My main area of recent research has concerned infant development, especially social development. Recent thesis students have conducted studies on singing directed at infants, and on empathy and jealousy amongst infants. In the coming year, I would be highly interested in following up on their findings, or helping to design and conduct new studies involving infants. In the past I have performed research on parents' decision making about care for their child with autism, eyewitness identification (accuracy on lineups and mugshots), suggestibility to false information amongst children and the elderly, and the prosocial behavior of cancer patients' siblings.
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Todd Kahan
My research focuses on the role attention plays in perception, memory and language. If you are potentially interested in exploring (1) visual perception, (2) attention, (3) memory (sensory, short term, working episodic or semantic), or (4) word recognition, you should make an appointment to talk with me. A non-exhaustive list of questions I am interested in includes:
- Why are people blind to portions of their visual environment?
- Do certain aspects of the environment capture attention?
- Is ignored information stored in memory?
- How are words retrieved from semantic memory?
I have several possible thesis ideas (at different stages of development), and would be happy to discuss my research with you. If you have your own ideas related to one of these areas, or if you do not yet have a thesis idea and would like to talk more about these topics, please contact me.
I am on leave this year and will not be advising any senior theses.
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John Kelsey
My research interests tend to focus on the neurochemical and neuroanatomical bases of behavioral disorders, with a most recent focus on drug addiction, Parkinson's, and schizophrenia. We typically model these disorders in rats and attempt to modify, usually improve, these disorders with drugs, brain lesions, and environmental manipulations. Recently, we have focused on the role of glutamate in all of these disorders.
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Nancy S. Koven
Neurobiological correlates of cognitive and affective functioning
Through collaborations with researchers at Dartmouth Medical School and other institutions, I will continue a research line that focuses on the structure and function of brain structures involved in various cognitive (e.g., working memory, selective attention, self-evaluation) and affective (e.g., attention to and clarity of emotion) processes in severe mental illness such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. While I will not be able to conduct new MRI work at Bates in the foreseeable future, for students interested in neuroimaging, it may be possible to tailor a senior thesis to pose questions regarding volume (volumetry) and shape (morphometry) of relevant brain structures across samples of particular interest using existing MRI datasets. Particular questions of interest to me are:
- What are the most important facets of the emotional awareness deficit in schizophrenia?
- Are white matter tract changes related to alexithymia in schizophrenia?
- Are emotion-processing deficits in severe mental illness related to diminished tissue density in frontal regions? What is the functional connectivity in emotion self-evaluation of frontal lobe regions with other brain regions (e.g., parietal lobe)?
Neuropsychological processes in emotion regulation
Emotion regulation refers to a coordinated set of processes by which we evaluate emotional information and modulate emotional responses. My research contrasts two regulation strategies, reappraisal and suppression, in their efficacy of reducing unwanted negative emotions, measuring the effects of emotion regulation with a variety of research techniques (e.g., self-report measures, facial affective coding, information-processing behaviors via computer interface). More specifically, I am interested in patterns of hemispheric asymmetry, as measured with neuropsychological tests, and relative emotion regulation success. Research questions include:
Personality individual differences in cognition-emotion interactions
As affective processing includes attention, appraisal, subjective feelings, and physiological responding, considerable neural circuitry is recruited to execute these activities such that there is substantial overlap in brain regions involved in both cognition and emotion. Broadly speaking, I am interested in the effects of positive and negative emotion on mechanisms involved in executive functioning, attention, and memory in individuals who are predisposed to certain moods, using neuropsychological models of brain activity to predict certain cognition-emotion interactions. Topics for further investigation may include:
- How do highly anxiety sensitive individuals employ strategies of attentional deployment?
- How does emotional content bias memory of newly learned information in alexithymic individuals?
- How do individuals with approach and avoidance temperaments differ in their executive functioning skills?
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Susan Langdon
Conceptualizing respect; lifespan development- especially adolescence; psychological and social aspects of sport and exercise; diverse perspectives including gender issues and culture.
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Kathy Graff Low
Eating and body image
I am in the process of completing a computer-based intervention study for preventing eating disorders. I have lots of qualitative and quantitative data from that study that might be of interest to students. Variables include sub-scales of the EDI, the Protestant Ethic, Internalization of the thin ideal, BMI, religiosity, social support, demographics, and others. One area that hasn’t been explored is whether or not participants’ evaluations of the program were related to outcomes. In addition, the degree to which on line discussion groups created useful group dynamics could be assessed.
Abuse of prescription drugs in college students
Previous thesis research has suggested substantial abuse of prescription drugs on college campuses, but there is little extant published research. Further exploration of motivations for use, gender differences, and the types of drugs being used would be interesting.
Health and Wellness in Students and Adults
I am currently collaborating with Healthy Androscoggin, the local public health organization, on a study of substance use and abuse in 18-25 year old non-college bound emerging adults. We will continue to look at public health interventions for substance abuse and tobacco in this population over the next year or two. In addition, I work with the Maine Governor's Council on Physical Activity evaluating a variety of state-sponsored pedometer programs. We are currently evaluating a 12 month physical activity pedometer intervention with children and adults.
I am on leave for the Winter 2008 semester and will not be advising any senior theses during that period.
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Georgia Nigro
My research interests are diverse. One set of interests centers on children's memory, in particular, on the development of interview methods that will increase preschool children's correct recall and resistance to misinformation. A second set of interests has to do with adolescents and the law and the extent to which youthful risk-taking has come to be seen as criminal behavior. A third set of interests involves the assessment of sexual risk and communication about sexual behavior.
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Michael Sargent
Race and Automatic Cognition
Much of my research is designed to ask how people’s social judgment and decision-making are affected by the race of the individuals to whom they are reacting, particularly when those judgments and decisions must be made under time-pressure. In much of my recent work, the focus is on a well-documented tendency for people to erroneously classify objects that are not weapons as weapons when those objects appear in close temporal or physical proximity to Black males, as opposed to White males. This form of racial bias, if it affects law enforcement officers’ “shoot/don’t shoot” decisions, could lead them to mistakenly think that a Black suspect is confronting them with a weapon when he is not, and such a mistake could have fatal consequences. Although researchers at other academic institutions were the first to document this tendency, my students and I are attempting to add to that growing research literature by determining some of the conditions under which this effect occurs, and the mechanisms by which it occurs. More generally, my goal is to understand when and how race biases perceptions of threat in one’s environment.
Much of my other work is on a new set of measures that purport to assess “implicit” or “unconscious” racial biases. Such measures have become popular among social psychologists, and also influential of thinking within the field, and in other fields, including the law. What I want to understand is what such measures are actually indicators of.
Deliberative Cognition
I am also interested in more deliberative judgments—judgments that can be made after careful thought. Here, my interests are in understanding the conditions under which individuals reason in a deductive, principled manner, deriving specific judgments and decisions from general principles. For example, what conditions have to hold for a Supreme Court Justice to derive his or her decision in a particular case from a relatively abstract constitutional principle? Justices such as Antonin Scalia claim to reason in this manner; what conditions must hold in order for that claim to be true? And what are the conditions under which such judgments are influenced by arguably irrelevant factors—such as the race or sex of the parties involved?
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Krista Scottham
I am interested in both the process of racial identity formation, and the relationship between race-related attitudes and important life outcomes. To date, much of my research has focused on racial identity development among African American adolescents. More specifically, my research program has centered on better understanding how teens discuss race with their parents, and how these conversations influence identity development. In the future, I plan to explore the feasibility of using remote data collection techniques, such as the internet, to access research populations.
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