PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT

The psychology major at Williams College attracts a very large number of students (approximately 70-80 majors/year) with diverse interests, goals, and backgrounds. Our students follow a curriculum that teaches them not only about what we know about mind and behavior, but also about how we know it, and about how to use the methods of scientific inquiry to critically evaluate information, generate new knowledge and imagine its implications and applications in the world. Students take a range of courses spanning the sub-disciplines of neuroscience, cognitive, clinical, developmental, and social psychology, as well as the psychology of education. In addition, several interdisciplinary courses and tutorials were offered this year including: Environmental Psychology, the Psychology of Nonviolence, Magic, Superstition, and Belief, and Image, Imaging and Imagining: The Brain and Visual Arts. Students in the latter course were involved in the many talks and events for Williams College Art Museum exhibition, “Landscapes of the Mind: Contemporary Artists Contemplate the Brain” co-curated by Professor Betty Zimmerberg and Interim Associate Curator Kathryn Price at WCMA.

Psychology students have multiple opportunities to conduct research collaboratively with professors. Some of these are empirical projects conducted within required 300-level level lab courses, and others are in work-study or research assistant positions or as more formal independent studies. Also, in 2009-2010 students, six students completed year-long senior honors thesis research under the direction of Psychology faculty, on topics such as “Bystander Behavior in Context: Do Misperceptions of Group Norms Influence Children’s Responses to Bullying Episodes,” “Mother-Child Co-Construction of Interpretive Bias to Threat: Examining Behavior and Autonomic Arousal during Discussion of Ambiguous Situations,” “An Incremental Examination of an Expertise System in Face Processing,” and “Predictors of Anxiety in Young Adults with a History of Parental Cancer.” Their projects are listed in the Student Abstracts section of this report.

Department events this year included student/faculty/family picnics in the Science quad with the traditional pizzas, volleyball, and informal conversation; evening programs on “Graduate Study in Psychology” and “Careers in Psychology”; and a wine and cheese reception on the evening of the honors theses presentations in the Psychology lounge. To encourage students to explore careers in psychology, the Class of 1960 Scholars Program brought accomplished researchers from other colleges and universities to campus to give colloquia. In advance of the colloquia, the group of 1960 Scholars read and discussed the speakers’ work with a faculty member and then joined the speaker and faculty for dinner afterward. A highlight this year was the visit of eminent developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan, from Harvard University. The 2009-2010 Class of 1960 Scholars are listed below. This year marked the third year of the G. Stanley Hall Prize in Psychology, funded by a generous gift from the Chuzi family, parents of Sarah Chuzi ’07, and given at graduation to a student who has demonstrated exceptional achievement in psychology. We were happy to award the prize to Gabriel Garza Sada ’10.

The faculty of the Psychology Department continued their varied and productive teaching and research programs, as detailed below. Several transitions took place this year. First, we were delighted to welcome Professor Nate Kornell, a cognitive psychologist who completed his BA at Reed College and Ph.D. at Columbia University, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at UCLA. Professor Kornell’s work centers on understanding the functional architecture of human learning and memory, and has implications for education as well. He taught a survey course in cognitive psychology, a research seminar, “Optimizing Learning and Memory,” and was a member of the psychology senior seminar teaching team. At the end of the academic year, we were very sad to lose Professor Joseph Greer to an academic research position at Mass General Hospital, where he will pursue fulltime work on interventions for anxiety and depression in cancer patients, and other topics in clinical health psychology. Joe’s research expertise, passionate teaching and collegiality will surely be missed.

Through all of these transitions and our ongoing activities as well, we could not function without the invaluable help of C.J. Gillig, Psychology Department Technical Assistant, and Beth Stachelek, Department Administrative Assistant. Their wisdom and cheerfulness, as well as ability to step in, often at the last minute, to support our work, is well-known to students from Introductory Psychology through senior honors theses students, and they help keep our large department feeling friendly and accessible. It is deeply appreciated by faculty as well.

Professor Phebe Cramer has continued to work on her research, writing and engaging in scholarly activities. Her research this year has continued to focus on longitudinal change in personality, from which she published three scholarly papers (see below).

She has been very busy in her position as Associate Editor of the Journal of Research in Personality. In addition, she continues as Consulting Editor for the Journal of Personality Assessment and for the European Journal of Personality. She also served as an ad hoc reviewer for multiple journals.

This past June, Professor Cramer was the invited speaker at the Rapaport/Klein meetings in Stockbridge, MA. Her lecture was entitled: “Empirical Studies of Defense Mechanisms,” in which she reviewed some 30 years of her research. In July, she attended the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Personality, in Evanston, IL. She presented a poster “Denial is Related to Undercontrol and Externalizing Behavior Problems in Childhood and Adolescence.”

Assistant Professor Jennifer Randall Crosby continued her research on intergroup interaction and the factors that influence perceptions of prejudice and discrimination. With summer research students Andrei Baui ’11 and Lisa Holub ’11, Professor Crosby focused on developing new laboratory methodology and materials currently being used in several studies. With Marissa Pilger ’11 and Erin Altenburger ’11, she examined what factors affect people’s responses to ambiguous cases of discrimination and to potentially offensive jokes. In an independent study conducted with Madeline Berky ’10, Professor Crosby examined the ways in which people are affected by the opinions of in-groups and out-groups regarding the appropriate response to homophobic behavior. This summer, Professor Crosby will work with Johannes Wilson ’11 and Jackson Lu ’12 on studies examining how group membership affects how willing and accurate people are when making judgments about others.

In addition to attending the meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) in Las Vegas, NV this year, Professor Crosby gave invited research talks at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and at Bowdoin College.

This past year, Senior Lecturer Susan Engel published two op-ed pieces in the New York Times. One focused on teacher training (Teach Your Teachers Well, Nov 2009) and the other on curriculum (Play to Learn, Feb 2010). She also published two pieces in the Teachers College Record: “What It Takes to Become a Great Teacher,” and “Putting the Child Back Into The School,”as well as a piece in On Board, the Newspaper for New York State Boards of Education. She was a reviewer for the journal Learning and Individual Differences and The Merrill Palmer Quarterly.

Professor Engel gave a talk on rethinking curriculum for The Alliance for Childhood in New York City, and a talk on the role of adults in children’s play for the program in Developmental Psychology at CUNY Graduate Center. She wrote a chapter titled “Flux and Flow in Children’s Narratives,” to appear in The Development of Imagination Handbook, edited by Marjorie Taylor to be published by Oxford University Press. She finished a new book, Red Flags or Red Herrings, which will be published in January 2011 by Simon and Schuster. She received a grant from the Spencer Foundation to organize a gathering of developmental psychologists who will meet in Oct 2010 to devise new ways of measuring student outcomes in our public schools.

The Program in Teaching hosted visits by Steve Barr, founder and director of the Green Dot Schools in LA, Omo Moses, Founder and Director of The Young People’s Project, and Josh Viertel, Director of Slow Food USA, Ben Klompus Principal of the BART Charter School in Adams MA. The program also hosted two roundtable discussions; one on what children should be reading and writing, and another on what schools are responsible for.

Assistant Professor Amie Ashley Hane’s research examines social and emotional development from infancy through middle childhood and integrates multiple levels of analysis, including behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroendocrine methodologies. She conducted two studies in her laboratory this year with the assistance of several dedicated students, including Chelsey Barrios ’12, Cam Nguyen ’12, Anna Szymanski ’12, Ashley Turner ’12, and Sarah Weber ’11. Professor Hane worked together with honors thesis student Emily Barrios ’10 on a study of dyadic co-construction of interpretive bias to threat, physiological reactivity, and childhood anxiety.

Professor Hane has continued to work in conjunction with colleagues at the University of Maryland where she is a co-investigator of a longitudinal project examining continuity in temperament from infancy through childhood. She also continued to work collaboratively with colleagues from the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Columbia University on research examining maternal depression, mother-infant interaction, and infant self-regulation. She is a co-investigator in an ongoing study at Columbia examining the effects of an intervention program for parents of infants admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit.

This year Professor Hane published original research in Developmental Psychobiology and Infancy. Her research was presented at the annual meeting of the Neuropsychological Society and the biennial meeting of the International Society in Infant Studies. This year Professor Hane served as an ad-hoc reviewer for several journals, including Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Early Human Development, Emotion, International Journal of Behavioral Development, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Journal of Early Adolescence, Psychiatric Research, and Psychological Bulletin.

Professor Laurie Heatherington completed her seventh and final year as Department Chair and is looking forward to a sabbatical in spring 2011. During the year, she continued her research and writing on change processes in psychotherapy, including ongoing research on the therapeutic alliance in couple and family therapy (in collaboration with colleagues at SUNY Albany and Universidad de La Coruña, Spain), predictors of retention and outcome in group CBT treatment for anxiety disorders (in collaboration with psychologists at the Brien Center and Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, MA), and outcomes of residential treatment for major mental illness. Students were involved in all of these projects as well as their own thesis and independent study research projects on stigma toward mental illness in the US and Mexico and cross-cultural issues in cognitive behavior therapy. In October, Professor Heatherington organized the first New England Regional Conference of the North American Society for Psychotherapy Research in October 2009 on the Williams campus, which was attended by 90⁺ colleagues and included research presented by several Williams alums who are now psychologists.

Professor Heatherington attended the Association for Psychological Science Convention in Boston in May, along with former students Elizabeth Pasipanodya ’09 and Ryan Jacoby ’09, who presented their thesis research on predictors of relationship satisfaction in sero-discordant couples in Uganda and sibling relationships and clinical anxiety, respectively. In October 2009, she attended the Canadian Society for Psychotherapy Research Conference in Montreal where she presented a paper and the New England Society for Psychotherapy Research Conference (mentioned above), where she presented a paper and organized a roundtable discussion. With colleagues, she completed chapters “Schools of Psychotherapy”and “The Beginnings of a Scientific Approach” for the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Psychology, “Therapeutic Alliances and Alliance building in Family Therapy” for The Therapeutic Alliance: An Evidence-Based Approach to Practice and Training, and “The Alliance in Couple and Family Therapy” in Psychotherapy Relationships that Work: Evidence-Based Practice.

Professor Heatherington continued to serve on the editorial boards of Psychotherapy Research, Journal of Family Psychology, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, and Applications and did ad-hoc reviewing for several other journals and publishers. She served on the Associates Board of the Gould Farm (Monterey, MA), a treatment center/working farm, serving people with schizophrenia and other major mental illnesses and directs an ongoing eleven-year program evaluation & outcomes study there.

Professor Saul Kassin is currently teaching half time while serving as a Distinguished Professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. This year, the eighth edition of his textbook Social Psychology (with Steven Fein and Hazel Markus) was published by Cengage Learning. Kassin has also contributed chapters to a number of scholarly books and has presented talks at several colleges, universities, law schools, professional organizations, and conferences--including the Vera Institute of Justice, Cornell University Law School, New York University, and a keynote address entitled “On the Corruptive Power of Confessions” at the European Association of Psychology and Law in Gothenburg, Sweden. On January 9, 2010, he appeared as a guest on CBS 48 Hours and has served as Consulting Editor for Law and Human Behavior, Advisory Board member of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), Research Advisory Board member of the Innocence Project, external faculty for the International Centre for Research in Forensic Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, reviewer for the National Science Foundation, and consultant in a number of cases at the trial and appellate level. This past year, Kassin worked with General Counsel of the American Psychological Association in submitting amicus briefs to two state supreme courts. He has also received a two-year $250K grant from the National Science Foundation to study “The Videotaping of Interrogations: Testing Proposed Effects on Police, Suspects, and Jurors.”

Professor Kris Kirby published two papers during this past year, including one with Julia Finch ’97. With a grant from the National Science Foundation Professor Kirby continued his research on the curvature of utility functions, and on how the way that we perceive time may affect our choices between delayed rewards. Tasha Chu ’11 assisted with this research. He also supervised the honors thesis of Burcu Gürçay ’10 on Allais Paradox. In addition to serving as a reviewer for NSF grant applications, Professor Kirby served as an ad hoc reviewer for the journals Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Judgment and Decision Making, Learning and Motivation, Psychological Science, and Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.

Assistant Professor Nate Kornell and two students, Patricia Jacobs Klein ’11 and Veronica Rabelo ’11, attended the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science. They presented a poster that they co-authored with J. J. Augenbraun ’11 and Teresa Hoffman ’10 describing research on the potential benefits of tests in educational settings. The research came about as part of a class project in a new course, Optimizing Learning and Memory. Kornell also authored three posters and a talk at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society and he spoke about his research at nearby Bennington College and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. The magazine Scientific American Mind, among other news outlets, featured an article about his research on the benefits of trying to retrieve information from memory even if the retrieval effort to retrieve fails.

Professor Marlene Sandstrom’s research continues to focus on socially vulnerable children. Over the past year, she has been running the Bystander Action Project in 6 local schools. This is an NSF-funded project designed to empower children to take an active stand against victimization at school. In the spring, Professor Sandstrom’s research on popularity in high school and adjustment in emerging adulthood was presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Adolescence in Philadelphia. Over the past year, Professor Sandstrom has written an article on bullying and bystander behavior to be published in Basic & Applied Social Psychology as well as an article on popularity to be published in Merrill-Palmer Quarterly. In addition, she has served as an ad hoc reviewer for Journal of Personality, Child Development, Social Development, British Journal of Developmental Psychology, Basic & Applied Social Psychology, and Merrill-Palmer Quarterly.

Associate Professor Noah Sandstrom spent a fall sabbatical continuing his work exploring the neuroprotective effects of estradiol and the mechanisms through which these effects occur. Sandstrom and students Jennah Durham ’10 and Katherine Jordan ’09 have described how the occlusion of blood flow to the brain damages several brain regions, resulting in impairments in learning and memory processes. The steroid hormone estradiol, however, minimizes the extent of both neuroanatomical damage and behavioral impairment. This work will be presented at an upcoming meeting of the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology (SBN). Sandstrom has also served as a reviewer for several journals and as a reviewer for the Behavioral Neuroscience Fellowship study section at the National Institutes of Health. He was also a panelist on careers in behavioral endocrinology at the 2009 meeting of SBN.

Professor Kenneth Savitsky continued his research on egocentrism in everyday social judgment and developed a new tutorial course on social psychology as it pertains to the environment—how the environment influences aspects of human psychology (e.g., the psychological implications of humans’ disconnect with nature), as well as how human psychology influences the environment (e.g., why some people engage in environmentally destructive behaviors despite holding pro-environmental attitudes). In January, he presented a lecture entitled “Encouraging Environmentally Responsible Behavior” at the Luce Retreat on Sustainability at Williams.

Professor Betty Zimmerberg continued her research on the epigenetics of anxiety behavior. Kathleen Palmer ’09 explored the role of allopregnanolone synthesis in the differential affective behavior of rats selectively bred for high and low rates of distress calls after a brief maternal separation as her senior thesis. Shivon Robinson ’11 and Sa-Keira Hudson ’11 conducted behavioral experiments looking at learning differences in high and low juvenile rats in the fall and winter study before Shivon traveled to New Zealand for a spring semester. Another lab member, Fhatarah Zinnamon ’11, took an independent study on the neuroscience of creativity before going to Spain for her spring semester. Meeting up with Ashley Martinez ’09 in Chicago at the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology’s annual meeting last November, they gave a poster presentation entitled “Communal Nesting Alters the Development of Affective and Social Behavior in Rats Selectively Bred for an Infantile Trait.” Other professional activities last year included serving on the Editorial Board of Developmental Psychobiology and the Program Committee of the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society, as well as reviewing for several journals.

From January to May, Betty Zimmerberg curated an art exhibition at the Williams College Art Museum, entitled “Landscapes of the Mind: Contemporary Artists Contemplate the Brain”. The first WCMA exhibit connecting science and art, this show featured four contemporary artists whose work literally or metaphorically explored brain structure and function. The artists, Susan Aldworth, Jessica Rankin, Katy Schimert, and Andrew Carnie, came to Williams to give talks and meet with students in Zimmerberg’s interdisciplinary course, “Image, Imaging and Imagination: the Brain and Visual Art”. Students also served as tour guides at a symposium bringing neuroscientists Sally and Bennett Shaywitz from Yale and Bevil Conway from Wellesley together with artists Aldworth from London and Schimert from New York. Williams science faculty who generously gave of their time and participated in three interdisciplinary gallery talks were Andrea Danyluk, Safa Zaki, and Lara Hutson. Finally, a fun-filled afternoon at the museum was led by Noah Sandstrom, Heather Williams and Martha Marvin along with Neuroscience concentrators with scavenger hunts in the galleries, science activities and demonstrations, and art activities – all about the brain!

Professor Jennifer Randall Crosby, Williams College

“Attitudes and Behavior”
Dr. Jerome Kagan, Harvard University

“The Temperamental Thread”
Dr. Robert Kurzban, University of Pennsylvania

“Sex, Drugs, & Moral Goals: Is Morality Used Strategically?”
Dr. Jason Mitchell, Harvard University

“Using Self to Understand Others: fMRI Studies of Social Cognition”
Dr. Arthur Shapiro, American University

“Visual Illusions – Research at the Intersection of Neuroscience, Psychology, Physics, Computer Science, Art, and Philosophy”
Professor Betty Zimmerberg, Williams College

Interdisciplinary Gallery Talk, WCMA, “Landscape, Memory and Mind: Neuroscience Perspective”
WCMA Symposium Talk, “Neuroculture: Bridging Science and Art”

Phebe Cramer

“Empirical Studies of Defense Mechanisms”
Annual Meeting of the Rapaport-Klein Study Group, Stockbridge, MA

“Denial is Related to Undercontrol and Externalizing Behavior Problems in Childhood and Adolescence”
Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Research in Personality, Evanston, IL
Jennifer Randall Crosby

“Stumbling Over Good Intentions: Unexpected Consequences in Interracial Interactions”
Bowdoin College; University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amie Ashley Hane

“Infant Self-Contingency (Auto-Correlation) as a Component of Emotion Regulation”
Paper presented as a poster at the biennial meeting of the International Society in Infant Studies, Baltimore, MD with B. Beebe, A. Margolis, S. Markese, J. Jaffe, A. Chavarga, A., et al.

“Gaze and Touch, with Partner and Object, as 4-Month Joint Attention Precursors: Maternal Depression and Disorganized Attachment”
Paper presented as a poster at the biennial meeting of the International Society in Infant Studies, Baltimore, MD with B. Beebe, N. Parashar, A. Chavarga, J. Reuben, A. Margolis, et al.

“Infant Proneness to Anger, Maternal Sensitivity During Object-Focused Play, and Joint Attention Skill”
Paper presented as a poster at the biennial meeting of the International Society in Infant Studies, Baltimore, MD
with J.M. McDermott

“Infant Anger Expression, Early Social Communication and the Development of Attention Problems in Young Preschoolers”
Paper presented as a poster at the biennial meeting of the International Society in Infant Studies, Baltimore, MD with J. He, J.M. McDermott, & K.A. Degnan,

“Continuity of Exuberance from Four Months to Five Years Using a Novel Task”
Paper presented as a poster at the biennial meeting of the International Society in Infant Studies, Baltimore, MD with M.L. Kirwan & K.A. Degnan

“Maternal Socialization of Emotion Regulation: Promoting Social Engagement among Inhibited Toddlers”
Paper presented as a poster at the biennial meeting of the International Society in Infant Studies, Baltimore, MD with E.C. Penela, H.A. Henderson, & M.M. Ghera

“Relations among Sympathetic, Parasympathetic, and Neuroendocrine Responses to a Modified Still-Face Paradigm”
Paper presented as a poster at the biennial meeting of the International Society in Infant Studies, Baltimore, MD with L.E. Philbrook & S. Weber

“Infant Self Regulation of Affect vs. Attention Differs with Mother vs. Novel Partner”
Paper presented as a poster at the annual meeting of the International Neuropsychological Society, Acapulco, Mexico with A. Margolis, B. Beebe, S. Markese, J. Jaffe, K. Buck, H. Chen, & P. Cohen
Laurie Heatherington

“Corrective Experiences in Individual Psychotherapy: Clients’ Perspectives”
Paper presented at the Canadian Society for Psychotherapy Research Conference, Montreal, QC, Canada

“Beyond the Honeymoon: Sustaining Practice-Research Collaborations”
Paper presented at the New England Society for Psychotherapy Research Conference, Boston, MA

“Assessing Outcomes in Manualized, Open Group Therapy in a Community Mental Health Setting”
Roundtable Discussion at the New England Society for Psychotherapy Research Conference, Boston, MA
Nate Kornell

“The Relative Value of Testing Familiar Information versus Studying Novel Information”
Poster presented at the 22nd annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, Boston, MA with P. Klein ’11, J. Augenbraun ’11, T. Hoffman ’10, & V. Rabelo ’11

“Learning by Failing”
Invited address at Bennington College, Bennington, VT

“Optimizing Inductive Learning: Metacognitive Beliefs and Actual Outcomes”
Invited address at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Amherst, MA

“Interleaving as the Friend of Induction”
Poster presented at the 50th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Boston, MA with M. Birnbaum & R. A. Bjork

“Reversing the Spacing Effect: Support for an Accessibility Principle”
Paper presented at the 50th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Boston, MA with R. A. Bjork & F. Cheung

“Difficult Rule-based Category Learning Benefits from Massed Practice”
Poster presented at the 50th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Boston, MA with M. A. Garcia, & R. A. Bjork

“Preparing to Teach Improves the Processing and Retention of Information”
Poster presented at the 50th annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Boston, MA with J. F. Nestojko, D. C. Bui, & E. L. Bjork

“The Cognitive Costs and Benefits of Preparing to Teach”
Poster presented at the Symposium of the Science of Learning in Medical Education, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA. * Winner of Best Poster, Research Category with J. F. Nestojko, D. C. Bui, & R. A. Bjork
Marlene Sandstrom,

“ Life after High School: Adjustment of Popular Teens in Emerging Adulthood”
Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Adolescence, Philadelphia, PA with A. Mayeux & A. Cillessen
Betty Zimmerberg

“Communal Nesting Alters the Development of Affective and Social Behavior in Rats Selectively Bred for an Infantile Trait”
International Society for Developmental Psychobiology annual meeting, Chicago, IL with A.R. Martinez ’09 & S.A. Brunelli