On Monday, April 27, 2009 at 4:00 p.m. in the Massachusetts Room of the Mullins Center at UMass Amherst, Sally I. Powers (psychology), director of the Center for Research on Families, presented the last of this academic year's presentations in the Distinguished Faculty Lecture Series. Her talk was entitled, "Hormones and Lovers' Quarrels: How Stress Translates Into Depression." Read more.

Paying Attention to Language: Lisa Sanders Uses a Research Grant to Study What Can Go Wrong When Children Learn Language.

Lisa Sanders’ introduction to neuroscience came when she was taking an undergraduate psychology course at Rice University. The professor brought in a human brain, and Sanders was hooked. Now she is director of the Neurocognition and Perception Laboratory at UMass Amherst.

In spring 2008, the John Merck Fund awarded Sanders a $300,000 grant to research a possible correlation between attention deficit disorders and language acquisition problems. Sanders was one of two researchers in the United States to receive the John Merck Scholars Program grant “to encourage exceptional young individuals to focus on the problems of children who are mentally challenged and emotionally disturbed.”

According to Sanders, there has been relatively little investigation into whether there is a causal relationship between attention problems and language acquisition problems—and what precisely the relationship is. “When a child is learning language, any number of things can go wrong,” she says. A child might not hear well or be able to process what he or she hears effectively.

This fall, Sanders’ lab started testing about 60 young children, and without the Merck grant to cover the study’s expenses, Sanders believes she probably would have had to wait 10 years to pursue this research. Among her team members are a half dozen undergrads. Sanders knows firsthand how valuable the experience can be for undergrads: “There’s always something going on in the lab, and they learn how to help each other out and be part of a team.”

From the four-year study Sanders wants to find ways to help children learn language by improving their attentiveness. “The goal is to make the resources we develop as freely available as possible,” she says, "to parents, teachers, counselors, and community programs."

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Professor Harold D. Grotevant, the Rudd Family Foundation Chair in Psychology, has been named a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science in recognition of his "sustained contributions to the advancement of psychological science."

Psychology professor Richard P. Halgin has been appointed by Gov. Deval L. Patrick to the state Board of Registration of Psychologists. The eight-member board licenses qualified individuals to practice psychology and regulates that practice in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The Psychology Department is delighted to welcome several new faculty, including Craig Blatz, Eric Cheries, Brian Lickel, Harold Grotevant, Heather Richardson, Rebecca Spencer, and Adrian Staub. Read about our new faculty below.

Paula Pietromonaco and Sally Powers have received a major NIH grant to study depression risk predictors. Read more!

Our new faculty

Craig Blatz, Assistant Professor (starting Fall 2009), holds a doctorate in Social Psychology from the University of Waterloo ( Canada; 2008). He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. His research investigates government apologies and offers of reparations for historical injustices. He studies both the ways in which apologies and reparations may or may not contribute to the reconciliation of intergroup conflict, as well as what motivates support for (and opposition towards) apologies and reparations. Dr. Blatz has actively pursued cases of apologies and reparations in ongoing ethnopolitical conflicts (e.g., Canadian government's apology to the Chinese Canadian community for the "Head Tax," the centuries of abuse of Aboriginal North Americans since colonization, unjust destruction of an African Canadian community in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada). He plans to further pursue his interest in apologies and reparations in real-world settings to identify conditions that contribute to or diminish the ‘effectiveness' of these reconciliation measures. More generally, he plans to examine how conceptions of past injustices, and societal attempts to address these injustices, contribute to intergroup conflict and reconciliation.

Eric Cheries received his B.S. from UMass Amherst and his Ph.D. from Yale University (2007).  He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Psychology Department at Harvard University.  Dr. Cheries's work explores the nature and origins of our ability to successfully reason about objects, numbers, and agents by identifying the signature limitations of such processing early in development and across our evolutionary history.   He is primarily interested in human infants, but also has publications with human adults and non-human primates. Dr. Cheries is officially on leave of absence for the 2008-2009 academic year and is continuing his work at Harvard.  He will be full-time on the Amherst campus starting September 2009.

Harold Grotevant has joined the UMass clinical psychology faculty as the Rudd Family Foundation Endowed Chair. He joins us from the University of Minnesota, where he has done research on a variety of topics, including adoption, child and adolescent development, family dynamics, family assessment, identity development, and quantitative family research. He has collaborated on several major, multi-site, longitudinal studies of the effects of adoption, and will play a major role in the UMass Center for Research on Families.

Brian Lickel received his Ph.D from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2000, and he is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Southern California (tenured in 2006).  He will be joining the UMass Amherst faculty this fall, starting in September 2008.  Lickel's research examines issues of collective responsibility, such as what causes people to blame all members of a group for the actions of one (or a subset) of group members, and how judgments of collective responsibility are used to justify retribution against those groups. As an associate professor, Lickel brings a strong track record and much needed expertise and advising experience to the Psychology of Peace and Violence Concentration.  He is currently engaged in a number of international collaborations to examine how perceptions of collective responsibility, beliefs about blame, and support for retribution manifest themselves in ongoing ethnopolitical conflicts (e.g., relations between the indigenous Mapuche community and the larger Chilean population, American and British reactions to the occupation of Iraq). More broadly, his vision for the Psychology of Peace and Violence Concentration meshes exceptionally well with its current direction, and he seeks to further expand his international and interdisciplinary collaborations to specify mechanisms that can facilitate the resolution of ethnopolitical conflicts in many different parts of the world.

Heather Richardson earned her PhD in Psychology/Neuroscience at Michigan State University and did postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute. She was a Staff Scientist at the Scripps Research Institute. She will join the Neuroscience and Behavior Program in Fall, 2008. Her laboratory will focus on the neurobiological mechanisms underlying stress-related disorders using rodent models.

Rebecca Spencer, who received her PhD in Neuroscience from Purdue University and was a post-doctoral fellow and research scientist at UC Berkeley, joined the department in Septembe,r 2008. Rebecca's research in the Cognition and Action Lab  is focused on motor learning. One dimension of this research utilizes fMRI and patient populations to examine the role of the cerebellum in motor learning. A second dimension addresses the role of sleep in consolidation of motor and cognitive learning tasks. An interesting result from this work is her demonstration of an age-related decline in the benefit of sleep on learning.

Adrian Staub, who completed his PhD work in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, will join the Department faculty as an assistant professor in September, 2008. Prior to coming to UMass, he worked with Molly Potter at MIT on memory for visual scenes and on attentional processes.  Before that, he received a B.A. in Psychology from Harvard, and an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh. Most of his work is in psycholinguistics.  His primary area of interest is syntactic parsing, i.e., the process of analyzing the grammatical structure of a sentence as it is heard or read.   In most of his experiments, participants' eye movements are monitored as they read sentences in which syntactic structure has been manipulated.  (You can see the Umass eyetracking lab website here.) Much of his research has focused on questions about the time-course with which readers and listeners make use of their grammatical knowledge in the process of constructing an initial syntactic analysis of a sentence.  He is  interested in how grammatical constraints interact with probabilistic constraints, and in how the processing of individual words interacts with higher-level processing.  Lately, he has also become interested in the temporal dynamics of the process by which speakers make syntactic decisions in the course of sentence production, and in applying models of response time distributions to psycholinguistic data.