2014 Department News

Joe Tecce talked with Pembroke High School students about the psychology of body language. Posted 11/25/14.

Doctoral student M. E. Panero has been invited to join the student editorial board of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Posted 11/14/14.

Elizabeth Kensinger was appointed to serve as Associate Editor at the APA journal Emotion. Posted 11/12/14.

Joe Tecce hosted a talk for the University Fellowships committee with Dr. Jason Cavallari. A video of Dr. Cavallari's talk is available on our photo page. Posted 11/10/14.

Michelle Hurst has received an NSF-sponsored award in STEM education research for her poster, "Working Memory Involvement in Rational Number Processing," to be presented at IMBES conference in November. Posted 10/15/14.

Larisa Heiphetz and Liane Young have been awarded a grant from the The John Templeton Foundation, titled "A Social Cognitive Developmental Approach to Folk Representations of God's Mind." The investigators are Liane, Larisa, and Adam Waytz (Northwestern University), with a consultant, Jonathan D. Lane (Harvard University). Posted 9/26/14.

Alexa Veenema was awarded a five-year, $1.75 million NIH grant to study the neural circuits underlying social play behavior in juvenile rats and how these neural circuits differ between males and females. Social play is a highly rewarding behavior and has been shown to be important for the development of social skills in humans and rodents. Knowledge about sex-specific regulation of social play in rats may help understand social play deficits seen in autism, a neurodevelopmental disorder that shows a strong sex bias in prevalence. Posted 9/26/14.

Four of our students—James Dungan, Laura Niemi, , Josh Rottman, and Jordan Theriault—were awarded travel awards by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). M.E. Panero was awarded the SPSP Diversity Fund Travel Award, a competitive award intended to increase diversity within the personality and social psychology field. All of these awards allow recipients to travel to and present research at the upcoming SPSP annual convention. Posted 9/16/14.

Brendan Gaesser, Liane Young, and Elizabeth Kensinger have been awarded a Templeton Science of Prospection grant for their project, "Harnessing Episodic Simulation to Facilitate Prosociality." This award from the University of Pennsylvania and the John Templeton Foundation provides support for studies at the intersection of prospection, memory, and moral psychology. Posted 8/21/14.

Jim Russell's new work on disgust is featured in Boston College Magazine. Posted 8/19/14.

Michael Numan, professor in Psychology until 2012, has published a new book, Neurobiology of Social Behavior. Posted 8/15/14.

Sindy Cole, a postdoctoral fellow in Gorica Petrovich's Neurobiology of Feeding lab, has been awarded a NARSAD Young Investigator grant. This award from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation provides support for the most promising young scientists conducting neurobiological research. Posted 8/15/14.

Liane Young's Morality Lab is featured on WBUR's Common Health program in a series called "Beyond Good and Evil: New Science Casts Light on Morality in the Brain." Posted 8/7/14.

Jessica Karanian had two articles published/accepted recently: "The cortical basis of true memory and false memory for motion" in Neuropsychologia and "False memory for context activates the parahippocampal cortex" in Cognitive Neuroscience. Posted 7/1/14.

Sarah Kark's poster, entitled "Effect of valence on the recapitulation of sensory processing during emotional remembering," won the Nelson Butters Award at the 2014 Massachusetts Neuropsycholoigcal Society Science Symposium. Posted 6/12/14.

Nadine Weidman, who teaches our graduate seminar on the history of psychology, has just accepted the editorship of the APA journal, History of Psychology. Congratulations to Nadine! Posted 6/11/14.

Larisa Heiphetz was awarded the National Science Foundation Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Post-Doctoral Fellowship. Posted 6/5/14.

Elizabeth Kensinger has been appointed to serve on the Cognition and Perception Study Section, Center for Scientific Review at NIH,pl from July 1, 2014 - June 30, 2020. Posted 6/4/14.

Research on creativity and the arts is featured in the June 2014 APA Monitor. Studies by Sara Cordes, Jen Drake, Thalia Goldstein, Laura Niemi, and Ellen Winner are described. Posted 5/30/14.

Laura Niemi and Liane Young published a paper, Blaming the Victim in the Case of Rape, inPsychological Inquiry: An International Journal for the Advancement of Psychological Theory. Posted 5/23/14.

Larisa Heiphetz won APA's Division 7 Dissertation Award in Developmental Psychology. Posted 5/6/14.

Kelly Dumais was awarded the Engelhard Pingree Fellowship. This honor recognizes a student whose work has made the greatest contribution to the research mission of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Kelly was given the award by Candace Hetzner, the associate dean for academic affairs in the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Posted 5/5/14.

Christina Reppucci has been named a recipient of the Donald J. White Teaching Excellence Award for 2013-2014. Posted 5/5/14.

Gene Heyman has been promoted to Senior Lecturer. Posted 5/5/14.

Michelle Hurst received an NSERC (Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada) Postgraduate Scholarship. Posted 4/2/14.

Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab news: Sarah Kark was awarded an NSF graduate research fellowship, and Kelly Bennion and Jackie Ford were admitted to the Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience. Posted 4/2/14.

Liane Young provides an overview of her research in the February 2014 issue of the APS Observer. Posted 3/12/14.

Gene Heyman is featured in Science News and a New York Times debate about the nature of addiction. Posted 3/10/14.

Drew Linsley and Sean MacEvoy have published a paper in the journal Cerebral Cortex entitled "Encoding-stage Crosstalk Between Object- and Spatial Property-Based Scene Processing Pathways." Using perceptual experiments and fMRI, they show that two types of visual information people commonly use to recognize their whereabouts, scenes' 3D layouts and their object contents, are consolidated at a surprisingly early stage of scene processing. Posted 3/10/14.

David Miele, Assistant Professor in Counseling, Developmental, and Educational Psychology at the Lynch School of Education, who is an affliated faculty with the Psychology Department, has just been named to the first Sesquicentennial Challenge chair. This is an endowed assistant professorship to support junior faculty research and early-career development. Posted 2/26/14.

Sarah Kark won the Graduate Student Suzannah Bliss Tieman Poster Award at the 25th Annual NEURON Conference yesterday for her poster entitled, "Effect of valence on the recapitulation of sensory processing during emotional remembering." Posted 2/24/14.

Kelly Dumais and Caroline Smith, doctoral candidates in Alexa Veenema’s lab, each won a travel award of $2,000 from the Society for Neuroscience to present their work an the biannual FENS Forum of Neuroscience in Milan, Italy. Kelly and Caroline are among a total of only fifteen U.S., Canadian, and Mexican graduate students receiving this highly competitive travel award. Posted 2/4/14.

Alexa Veenema has been awarded a three-year NIH Academic Research Enhancement Award (R15): Sex and Age Differences in the Neural Regulation of Social Recognition. Posted 1/13/14.

Josh Rottman, Deb Kelemen, and Liane Young's research on our moral response to suicide featured in The Atlantic. Posted 1/9/14.