PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT

Students, faculty and staff in the Psychology Department enjoyed a busy and productive year in 2003-04. Psychology continues to be a very popular major nationwide and at Williams. In addition to the 150 students (juniors and seniors) majoring in psychology, our faculty have been instrumental in starting and leading related interdisciplinary programs in Cognitive Science, Leadership Studies, Legal Studies, and Neuroscience. We received invaluable help in managing all the activities described below from C.J. Gillig, Psychology Technical Assistant, and Beth Stachelek, our Department Administrative Assistant, who are well-known to students from introductory psychology through senior theses students.

There were several transitions in the department this year. Professor Laurie Heatherington began a three-year term as Department Chair, and Professor Al Goethals took a well-deserved sabbatical year, pursuing his studies on leadership at Amherst College in the fall and at the University of Richmond (VA) in the spring. Professor Ari Solomon was on Assistant Professor leave pursuing research on the nature of depression and its diagnosis. We were joined by two new faculty members this year, a one-year Visiting Professor in the Clinical psychology area, Professor Joe Greer and a two-year Visiting Professor in the Developmental area, Professor Lauren Shapiro. Professor Greer came from the University of Massachusetts, and taught, among other things, a new seminar course in behavioral medicine. We were very sorry to see him leave at the end of the year, and wish him well in his research/clinical post-doctoral fellowship in behavioral medicine in the Department of Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. Professor Shapiro joined us from Stanford University. Her area of specialization is the cross-cultural study of language and cognition. Visiting Professor Tony Scinta who has just earned his Ph.D. from UCLA in social psychology will join us for the coming year; his area of expertise is close relationships. Professor Bill von Hippel will also be visiting for one semester from the University of New South Wales, where he studies stereotypes and other social cognitive processes. Their courses will help fill teaching needs due to sabbaticals in the social psychology area. In other transitions, we said a fond farewell to Professor Elliot Friedman, who has accepted a Robert Wood Johnson Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, Department of Psychiatry. Many students have enjoyed and benefited greatly from his teaching in health psychology and psychoneuroimmunology, among other courses, and we wish him all the best.

Our students continue to be very active in curricular and extracurricular activities. Six students completed senior honors theses. Their projects are listed along with their advisors, in the Student Abstracts section of this report. A number of students completed one-semester independent study projects in which they worked closely with professors on research ranging from how the mind builds categories and how children construct narratives to how false confessions happen during police interrogations.

We were happy to convene the Student Liaison Committee (SLC), a group of junior and seniors that helps the department by consulting with the chair, assisting with interviews of new professors, and helping to plan social events between students and faculty. Events this year included a large “picnic” in the Science Court in the spring and a “games night” at the Log in the middle of the winter. The SLC members were Torrey Baldwin ’04, Lindsey Boland ’04, Alyssa Fluty ’05, Rebecca Herlan ’04, Beth Mulligan ’05, Kyle Skor ’05, Anna Swisher ’05, Lindsay Taglieri ’04, and Molly Wasserman ’04. Twenty-nine students, listed below, participated in the Class of 1960 Scholars Program, which brings eminent speakers to campus to give a colloquium and interact with students who are particularly interested in psychology as a career.

Professor Phebe Cramer spent the spring semester at the Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley, funded by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. While there, she continued her research using the longitudinal data files of the Intergenerational Study, which has followed participants from birth into their seventieth year of life, and began a collaboration with the Mills Research Group, and their longitudinal study of college women. Professor Cramer is working on relating early life experiences with the development of defenses mechanisms, and investigating how these influence personality as the individual grows older. While at Berkeley, she also participated in four weekly graduate seminars on Attachment, Emotion, Advanced Statistics and Measurement, and Clinical Research.

Professor Cramer continues on the Editorial Boards of Journal of Research in Personality, European Journal of Personality, and Journal of Personality Assessment. In addition, she served as an ad hoc reviewer for: Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, Journal of Personality, Journal of Adolescence, Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Psychological Bulletin, Personality and Individual Differences, and Journal of Social and Personality Psychology. She also participated in the Williams-Austen Riggs Center study group, in which scholars from both institutions who have an interest in psychoanalytic theory meet to discuss how this theory informs their work.

This year the Program in Teaching under the direction of Senior Lecturer Susan Engel hosted a lecture by Louis Menand, “The Future of the Liberal Arts,” and a lecture by William Damon, “Character Education Revisited.” Teaching lunches included presentations by faculty member Dave Paulsen, “Coaching as Teaching” and by Rebecca Tucker-Smith, “Working with Special Needs Children,” among others.

Professor Engel published a chapter with Alice Li ’02 titled “Do Children Gossip? The Development of Shared Meanings” in The Mediated Mind: Essays in Honor of Katherine Nelson, and a chapter titled “My Harmless Inside Heart Turned Green: Children’s Narratives and Their Inner Lives” in Children’s Narrative Development.

Christie Schueler ’04 conducted a series of studies with Professor Engel on how children think about true and fictional stories. Professor Engel also gave the fall Sigma Xi lectures, “Piaget’s Children” and “ The Fancy Ladies of North Poo Poo: Play and Reality in Childhood.”

Professor Steven Fein conducted research on stereotypes and prejudice; social influence factors in perceptions of humor, sex roles, and racially sensitive attitudes; the roles of physiological and social psychological factors in women’s and men’s academic identity and achievement; and strategies to enable individuals to perform athletic and cognitive tasks well under pressure. Professor Fein co-authored the books, Social psychology (6th edition), and Readings in Social Psychology: The Art and Science of Research (3rd edition), with department colleague Saul Kassin. Professor Fein also co-authored the chapters, “The Role of Motivation in the Unconscious: How Our Motives Control the Activation of Thoughts and Shape Our Actions,” for the book, Social Motivation: Conscious and Unconscious Processes, and “Math is Hard! Responses of Threat vs. Challenge Mediated Arousal to Stereotypes Alleging Intellectual Inferiority,” for the book, Gender Differences in Mathematics. His article, “Arousal and Stereotype Threat,” was accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

In addition to invited colloquia around the country, Professor Fein also chaired a symposium entitled, “Stereotyping and Prejudice in Context: Integrating Personal and Sociocultural Norms with Cognitive and Motivational Factors,” at the annual meeting of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, in October in Boston. He also presented a paper there, “Stereotyping and Prejudice in Context: Self-Image Motives and Local Norms.”

With Dr. Talia Ben-Zeev of San Francisco State University, Professor Fein received a quarter-million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation for their research, entitled, “Cognitive and Physiological Effects of Stereotypes on Problem Solving.”

Professor Fein served as a consulting editor at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and for Psychological Science. He also served on the Executive Committee of the International Society for Self and Identity. Professor Fein supervised the work of numerous independent study projects, Winter Study independent study projects, and several research assistants. He also helped continue to coordinate and teach in the Summer Humanities and Social Science program at Williams.

Professor Fein taught a new Winter Study course with Stewart Johnson of the Math Department that proved to be very popular, entitled, The Science of Deception. With the help of Charles Baschnagel ’05, a highlight of the course was a lab focusing on the mathematical and psychological factors relevant to playing poker.

Professor George R. Goethals spent the 2003-04 academic year on sabbatical. In the fall, he was a visiting professor in the Psychology Department at Amherst College; and in the spring, he was a visiting scholar at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies at the University of Richmond in Virginia. While on leave, Professor Goethals finished editing the Encyclopedia of Leadership, published by Sage, with co-editors Georgia Sorenson and James MacGregor Burns. He also completed a chapter on Nonverbal Behavior and Political Leadership to be published in a volume for Lawrence Erlbaum Associates edited by Ronald Riggio and Robert Feldman. Professor Goethals is also editing a book on a general theory of leadership with colleagues at the Jepson School.

In July 2003, Professor Laurie Heatherington began a three-year term as Chair of the Psychology Department. During the year, she continued her studies on change process research in couple and family therapy, and on the role of parents’ attributions about the causes of teen’s negative behaviors in family conflict and parenting efficacy. This work is done in an ongoing collaboration with Williams students and with colleagues at SUNY-Albany and Simon Fraser University.

In August 2003, Professor Heatherington and former Williams students presented several papers at the American Psychological Association Conference in Toronto, Canada: With Natalie Tolejko ’02, “Attributions in Parent-Teen Relationships: Do They Matter?” with Dahra Jackson ’00, “Stigma about Mental Illness Among Young Jamaicans,” and with Valerie Lothian ’01, “Gender, Ethnicity, and Self-Presentation of Achievement.” In November 2003, Professor Heatherington attended the North American Society for Psychotherapy Research conference in Newport, Rhode Island, where she chaired a panel, “New Developments in the System for Observing Family Therapy Alliances (SOFTA)/Sistema de Observación de la Alianza Terapéutica en Intervención Familiar” and a discussion group on advancing family therapy research within the Society for Psychotherapy Research. In April 2004 she presented, “Long-term Follow-up of Mental Health Outcomes: Building a Model for Evaluation in Community Settings” to the Center for Mental Health Services Research in the Department of Psychiatry, U Mass Medical Center, and in June 2004, she co-authored a paper, “Evolution of Clients’ Goals for Therapy: To Have What I Want, or to Want What I Have?” with collaborators from Simon Fraser University, at the annual conference of the International Society for Psychotherapy Research, Rome, Italy.

Professor Heatherington continued to serve on the editorial board of Psychotherapy Research and the Journal of Marital and Family Research, was re-appointed to serve on the editorial board of the Journal of Family Psychology, and newly appointed to serve on the editorial board of Psychotherapy. She served on the Board of Directors and 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 outcomes study there.

Professor Saul Kassin published the fourth edition of his textbook, Psychology (Prentice Hall, 2004) and the first edition of a new text, Essentials of Psychology (Prentice Hall, 2004). He contributed chapters to two edited scholarly books. The first is entitled “True or False: I’d Know a False Confession if I Saw One,” in Granhag & Strömwall’s Deception Detection in Forensic Contexts (Cambridge University Press). The second chapter, with Christian Meissner, is entitled, “You’re Guilty, So Just Confess! Cognitive and Behavioral Confirmation Biases in the Interrogation Room,” and appears in Lassiter’s Interrogations, Confessions, and Entrapment (Kluwer Academic Press). He and Rebecca Norwick ’00 published “Why People Waive Their Miranda Rights: The Power of Innocence.” Kassin also wrote an op-ed column in the Boston Globe entitled “Videotape Police Interrogations.” This past year, Kassin gave a Science Lunch talk about his research on false confessions. He also attended and spoke at a number of conferences. He gave invited addresses at the National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology (St. Petersburg, FL) and at the American Psychological Association (Toronto, Canada); presented a paper entitled “False Confessions” at the International Conference on Police Interviewing and Interrogation (Quebec) and at the Bench / Bar Forum on Wrongful Convictions of the Massachusetts Bar Association (Boston, MA); and presented a paper, “True and False Confessions to an Intentional Act: The Effects of Two Common Police Tactics,” at the American Psychology-Law Society (Scottsdale, AZ). At the Psychology & Law International, Interdisciplinary Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, he presented three papers, “The Central Park Jogger Case: Lessons Learned about Juvenile Interrogations and Confessions”, “Videotaping Interrogations: Does It Enhance the Jury’s Ability to Distinguish True and False Confessions?” and “The Post-Interrogation Safety Net: “I’d Know a False Confession if I Saw One” as well as a poster, “True and False Confessions to an Intentional Act: Preliminary Results Using a Novel Paradigm.” He also gave colloquia and guest lectures at the Institute of Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy (Charlottesville, VA), the New York State Bar Association (New York City), the McArthur Foundation Juvenile Justice Network (Austin, TX), the North Carolina Actual Innocence Commission (Raleigh, NC), the University of Massachusetts (Amherst, MA), the University of Connecticut (Storrs, CT), Nassau Community College (Garden City, NY), Göteborg University (Göteborg, Sweden), and the Massachusetts District Court Judge’s Conference (Williamstown). Kassin continued to serve as a consulting editor for Law and Human Behavior, reviewer for the National Science Foundation, and consultant and expert witness in a number of cases—including some involving DNA exonerations.

Professor Robert D. Kavanaugh completed his fourth (and final) year as Director of the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences where he was involved in organizing several interdisciplinary lecture series, and overseeing the Center’s colloquia, seminars, and weekly research lunches. In the psychology department, Dr. Kavanaugh continued his research on the development of imagination and causal reasoning in young children, primarily through a longitudinal study now in its third year. In April, Dr. Kavanaugh presented a paper with Reka Daroczi ’04 entitled “A Longitudinal Study of Symbolic Thought” at the Conference on Human Development, Washington, D.C. During the past year, Dr. Kavanaugh also served as an ad hoc reviewer for the journals Child Development, Developmental Psychology, and Cognitive Development.

Assistant Professor Marlene Sandstrom’s research this past year has continued to focus on children’s peer relationships. She is particularly interested in issues of competence and resiliency – that is, how children negotiate difficult peer experiences (teasing, exclusion, victimization) over time. Over the summer, Professor Sandstrom conducted in-depth interviews with 100 children and parents from the North Adams and Pittsfield school systems. Along with Williams students Rebecca Herlan ’04, Gianna Marzilli ’04, and Kelley Morgen ’05, she also designed and implemented an experimental paradigm to explore children’s reactions to evaluative feedback from peers. Based on this work, Professor Sandstrom supervised Rebecca Herlan’s honors thesis on the role of status accuracy in aggressive responding. In addition, Dr. Sandstrom has begun to examine the behavioral implications of popularity among middle- and high-school students. Through a collaboration with researchers from the University of Connecticut, Professor Sandstrom has been exploring longitudinal data on peer status and behavior from the Manchester Youth Study. Over the past year, Professor Sandstrom has had manuscripts accepted to the Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, and Journal of Pediatric Psychology. She is an active member of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Research in Child Development. Professor Sandstrom recently presented her work on perceived popularity and behavioral adjustment at the biannual meeting of the Society for Research in Adolescence in Baltimore. Over the past year, Professor Sandstrom has served as an ad hoc reviewer for the Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology.

Assistant Professor Noah Sandstrom conducted research examining hormonal modulation of cognitive processes including attention and memory. Work with students during the summer of 2003 investigated the influence of androgens on memory retention and will be presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference next fall. Along with his thesis student, Nick Bamat ’04, he continued to examine the extent to which estrogens may be neuroprotective in an animal model of ischemic brain damage. Using a variety of surgical, behavioral, and histological techniques, they have shown that estrogens can minimize the damage that results from transient global ischemia and gained some intriguing insights in to the ways in which hormone dose influences outcome.

Dr. Sandstrom attended a number of conferences including the annual meetings of the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology and the Society for Neuroscience where he presented two papers with Jessie O’Brien ’03. In the past year, Dr. Sandstrom has served as an ad hoc reviewer for Behavioural Brain Research and has published a paper in Hormones and Behavior.

Dr. Sandstrom again taught his upper-level neuroscience course, Hormones and Behavior, in which students conducted novel empirical research investigating changes in memory across pregnancy.

He took students from this course to a Behavioral Neuroendocrinology symposium at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In addition, he developed a new Winter Study course, Rat Olympics, in which students discussed the history of Behaviorism and the ways in which behaviorist principles are used in our everyday lives. As part of this course, student worked in teams to train rats in several “events” including the long jump, an obstacle course, and basketball.

Associate Professor Kenneth Savitsky conducted research on egocentrism in social judgment and published articles in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology and in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Dr. Savitsky presented his research findings in an invited colloquium at Northeastern University and in a Faculty Lecture at Williams.

Visiting Assistant Professor Lauren Shapiro joined the Psychology Department in July 2003. In the fall, Professor Shapiro team-taught Introductory Psychology (PSYC 101) and Perspectives on Psychological Issues (PSYC 401) with several of her Psychology Department colleagues, and in the spring she taught both Developmental Psychology (PSYC 232) and the laboratory course Experimentation and Statistics (PSYC 201).

Professor Shapiro set up a Cultural Psychology research laboratory in September, holding weekly lab meetings throughout the year with Jessica Au ’04, Dan Jacobs ’04, Sulgi Lim ’06, Hanika Payan ’04, Hyejin Rho ’06, and Lydia Romano ’05. The research team focused on how situational factors affect analytic and holistic thinking in the United States and East Asia. In the spring, Jessica and Hanika collected data at Berkshire Community College with the cooperation of Professor Wayne Klug, while Sulgi and Hyejin collected English-language data from Korean-Americans at Williams. In June, Hyejin and Sulgi collected Korean-language data in Seoul, South Korea with the cooperation of Yonsei University Professor Sungho Kim (formerly of Williams College) and Kyungwon College Professor Seok-chul Kim. This summer, the research team also is joined by Williams College Undergraduate Research Fellowship awardee Bethany Smith ’05, who is working together with Hyejin and Lydia to analyze the collected cross-cultural data, as well as develop new follow-up research.

In October, Professor Shapiro presented a paper on the early socio-cultural effects of Japanese and American mothers’ child-directed speech at the annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. In August, she will represent Williams College at the International Congress of Psychology in Beijing, China, supported by a National Science Foundation travel grant administered by the U.S. National Committee for Psychology. Professor Shapiro will present two papers at the Congress: “How Mothers Use Language to Guide Preschoolers’ Play in Japan and the United States” and “Unstructured Language-Use Promotes Analytic Thinking in Japan and the United States.” In addition, this year Professor Shapiro also published a chapter on cross-cultural variation in the concept of “competence,” with Professor Hiroshi Azuma, immediate Past President of the Japan Psychological Association.

Assistant Professor Ari Solomon continued his research on depression, anxiety, and the validity of diagnostic criteria and symptom instruments. In December, he received NIMH funding as Principal Investigator for “Taxometric Analyses of Unipolar Depression,” a project designed to determine whether clinical depression is fundamentally distinct from everyday mood variability. The $50,000 award supports one year of collaborative work with Peter Lewinsohn and John Seeley of the Oregon Research Institute, and John Ruscio of Elizabethtown College. Other collaborative projects this year include a manuscript that reconsiders the controversial hypothesis that left-handedness is a marker for psychopathology, and another that examines the construct validity and clinical implications of “mixed” anxiety and depression. Dr. Solomon joined colleagues from Penn State to present their collaborative research on the validity of post-traumatic stress disorder screening tolls at the annual meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Behavior Therapy. This summer Dr. Solomon is coordinating a funded study of the construct validity of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder diagnostic criteria with colleagues at Neuroscience, Inc. in Bethesda, Maryland; Amy Hobbie ’04 is serving as the clinical research assistant.

Assistant Professor Safa Zaki continued her research on categorization behavior and recognition memory and various computational models of these processes. In the past year, she published two articles in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. In addition, two articles that she co-authored have been accepted for publication in Memory and Cognition, and one article has been accepted in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. Dr. Zaki also supervised the work of three independent study students and several research assistants in her lab.

Dr. Zaki, along with her colleagues, presented some of their new findings at several conferences: “A Hybrid-Similarity Exemplar Model for Predicting Distinctiveness Effects in Recognition” at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Vancouver, Canada; “An Exemplar-Based Random Walk Model of Old-New Recognition” at the 36th Annual Meeting of the Society for Mathematical Psychology Conference in Ogden, UT; and “Is Categorization Really Intact in Amnesia?” at the Second Annual J. S. McDonnell Foundation Sponsored Conference on the Cognitive Neuroscience of Category Learning in New York City. She served as an ad-hoc reviewer for the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition; Psychonomic Bulletin and Review; Neuropsychology; Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience; and Memory and Cognition.

Professor Betty Zimmerberg continued her research on the neural mechanisms underlying behavioral responses to fearful situations and how experiences of early deprivation, such as child neglect, might impair developing coping behavior. The research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, entitled “Early Experience and Neurosteroid Response to Stress.” During the summer, Kristin Sageser ’04 continued work on this project as part of her senior thesis, with an emphasis on the effects of early deprivation on the development of play behavior. Alyssa Fluty ’05 and Rui Nie ‘05 were also summer research assistants, working on a new project using a novel animal model of anxiety: rats bred for high and low rates of vocalization after brief maternal separation. In November, both Kristin and Rui accompanied Zimmerberg to New Orleans to present their research at the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology annual meeting, “Comparison of Early Stress Models on Subsequent Alterations in Social and Communicative Behavior in Rats” and “Long Term Effects of Selective Breeding for Infantile USV in Rat Pups on Novelty Suppressed Feeding in Adulthood,” respectively. Also in New Orleans, at a companion meeting, Nick Bamat ’04, presented research conducted in Zimmerberg’s Drugs and Behavior course (PSYC 312) with Michelle Kron ’04 and Andrew Schulte ’03 at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, entitled “Acute and Long-Term Behavioral Effects of Toluene in Neonatal Rats Selectively Bred for High or Low Vocalizations.” Rosemary Eseh ’04, the other senior thesis student in Zimmerberg’s lab, investigated the behavioral effects of iron deficiency during pregnancy in rats. Rosemary won a coveted NIH travel award to present her research this summer in Bordeaux, France, at the next meeting of the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology.

As chair of the Neuroscience Program, Zimmerberg directed the Essel Foundation Summer Program, which had 13 students working enthusiastically in neuroscience faculty labs in the Psychology and Biology Departments. Zimmerberg was an external reviewer for the Psychology Departments at Bard and Lafayette Colleges, and served on the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Science Advisory Committee. Other professional activities included serving on the editorial board of Developmental Psychobiology, on the steering committee of N.E.U.R.O.N and as the chair of the membership committee of the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society. Zimmerberg also was a grant reviewer for the Behavioral Neuroscience Program at the National Science Foundation and reviewed manuscripts for Behavior and Genetics, Developmental Psychobiology; Behavioral Neuroscience; Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research; Physiology and Behavior; Psychological Reports: Perceptual and Motor Skills; and Neuropharmacology. Zimmerberg was also a co-principal investigator on two grants funded by the National Science Foundation out of the University of Albany – SUNY. She also really enjoyed teaching in the Williams College Summer Program for Teachers, giving a class entitled “Brain Soup: How Nature and Nurture Work Together.”