Psychology Department

Student Research Academic years 2004-2005 and 2005-2006

Students are encouraged to conduct either independent research or to collaborate with faculty members. As you will see from the listing below, students are involved in conducting investigations into everything from eating disorders to the effects of cocaine on learning in rats. The quality of these projects is demonstrated by the fact that many of them have been presented at conferences such as the Society for research in Child Development, Western Psychological Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychological Society.

Here a partial listing of projects either currently in progress or completed within the last academic year.

In collaboration with or supervised by Professor Linder:

  • Individual differences in relational aggression among college students: A longitudinal approach.
  • Family dynamics and the development of eating disorders: Parental control, Parenting Styles, and Siblings
  • Sex-typed Behavior and Aggression in Preschoolers: The effects of parents’ sex-typed attitudes.
  • The Girls and the Media Project

In collaboration with or supervised by Professor Tompkins:

  • Relationship between subjective risk and impulsiveness, sensation seeking, and extrinsic life goals.
  • Parentification and maternal HIV infection: beneficial role or pathological burden.
  • The Families and Adolescents Coping with Stress (FACS) project.

With Professor Livesasy:

  • Modeling semantics using high-dimensional space models of meaning representation.
  • Hemispheric differences in word processing
  • Comparison of long versus short stimulus onset asynchrony in mediated priming.
  • The eyewitness memory project.

Under the supervision of or in collaboration with Professor Bakner:

  • Behavioral tolerance: Does time of drug administration effect the development of tolerance to the cannabinoid agonist WIN 55,212 in rats?
  • Drug discrimination: Conditioning paradigms that allow evaluation of unique drug states using the rat model.
  • The attenuation of cocaine induced conditioned place preferences by ethanol: An interaction of appetitive and aversive drug properties.
  • Retention of cocaine induced conditioned place preference in rats
  • Recovery of function after a motor cortical lesion: Does the acetylcholine antagonist scopolamine, facilitate recovery in rats?
  • The effects of Nimodipine (Ca2+ channel antagonist) on self administration of ethanol in Long-Evans rats.

With Professor Gilden:

  • Effects of brief exposure on value: an exploration of non conscious processing.
  • Mere exposure and the endowment effect: does it matter?