Student-Faculty Collaboration on Research

Psychology majors, particularly those considering graduate school, are encouraged to work closely with a faculty member on original research. Conducting research is a great way to learn about psychology first hand and it is also an important experience to have when applying for graduate school.  Students who are interested in conducting research should contact faculty members to find out what types of research opportunities are available in their labs.

During the past few years, students and faculty have collaborated on a wide variety of research.  Some of these research collaborations have led to student co-authored publications and conference publications.   Many of our students have also received Student Research and Creativity Grants to fund their own research projects or pay for travel expenses to present their research at national conferences.

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Developmental Psychology (Faculty member: Stephanie Madsen)

• Cassandra Allen - Adolescent romantic relationships
• Ellen Inverso & Colleen Gray - Parental involvement in adolescent relationships
• Rachel Schmidt - Media consumption and body image in adolescent girls
• Rachel Schmidt & Cassandra Allen - Can you build a baby genius?
• Melissa Collison & Cara Jacobson - Psychosocial effects of type I diabetes in adolescents

Clinical Psychology and the Brain's Response to Music (Faculty member: Paul Mazeroff)

• Teri Hamer - Differential emotional response to happy and sad music
• Elizabeth Meade - Psychophysiological differences in responses to songs with comprehensible words and songs with incomprehensible words
• Rachel Hurley, Elizabeth Meade, & Kristin O'Toole - The effect of musical notation on the cerebral hemispheric processing of music
• Ellen Gulya - Measuring psychotherapy outcomes in a partial hospitalization program
• Rachel Bryant  - Cross-cultural attitudes about fast food 

Behavioral Psychology (Faculty member: Margaret McDevitt)

• Diego de los Rios -  Effect of reinforcement context on reinforcement value
• Jodi Hunter - Transitivity of preference with probability schedules of reinforcement
• Nathan Klunk -  Effect of reinforcement context on reinforcement value 
• Arpineh Melrabi -  Effect of temporal variables in conditional discrimination learning 
• Mike Heady - An experimental analysis of free versus forced choice
• Christine Mayne - Similarity of preference with differentially signaled and unsignaled delayed reinforcers

Social Psychology (Faculty member: Wendy Morris)

• Chelsea Phillips & Jillian Hoffman - Improving accuracy in deception detection
• Allison Frush, Meghan Longhurst, & Emily Paull - Stereotypes in first encounters
• Molly Bolek - Coaches' perceptions of eating disorders in athletes: Underdiagnosing the atypical 
• Patrick O'Toole - Assessing discrimination toward Arab Americans in the post 9/11 world
• Jillian Hoffman - A longitudinal study of deception detection in friendships

Recent Student Publications and Conference Presentations

• *Heady, M.S., & McDevitt, M.A. (2004). Dynamics of Preference:  Arousal Doesn’t Make Better Seem Worse.  Maryland Association for Behavior Analysis 7th Annual Meeting, Baltimore, MD.
• *Mayne, C., & McDevitt, M. A. (2003).  Similarity of Preference with Differentially Signaled and Unsignaled Delayed Reinforcers.   Maryland Association for Behavior Analysis 6th Annual Meeting, Baltimore, MD.
• Madsen, S. D., *Inverso, E., *Gray, C., & *McGill, C. (2007, April). Parent regulation of adolescent dating activities. Poster to be presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research on Child Development, Boston, MA.
• Madsen, S. D., Van Abbema, D. L., *Schmidt, R. E., & *Allen, C. (2006). Questioning claims of baby genius: Students evaluate advertisements of infant stimulation products. Teaching of Psychology, 33, 134-137.
• Madsen, S. D., *Schmidt, R., *Allen, C., *Gray, C. & *Inverso, E. (2006, March).  Aussie elders ask and Yankee youth yak: Parent-adolescent communication about dating in Australia and America. In S. D. Madsen (Chair), Is three a crowd?: Cultural variations in parental involvement in adolescent romantic relationships. Paper symposium conducted at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research on Adolescence, San Francisco, CA.
• Madsen, S. D., *Inverso, E., *Gray, C., & *McGill, C. (2007, April). Parent regulation of adolescent dating activities. Poster to be presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research on Child Development, Boston,
  MA.
• McDevitt, M.A., and *Muro, M. A. (2003).  Transitivity of Preference for Reinforcer Magnitude.  Association for Behavior Analysis 29th Annual Convention, San Francisco, CA.
• *Phillips, C. J., *Hoffman, J. L., & Morris, W. L. (2007).  Improving Deception Detection by using Indirect Cues.  Annual Convention of the Association for Psychological Science, Washington, DC. 

 * Denotes student authors