2016 Department News
Katie McAuliffe has won the 2017 Early Career Research Contributions Award from the Society for Research in Child Development. Congratulations Katie! Posted 12/9/16.
Jessica Karanian received an APA Dissertation Award, which will be used to fund some of her dissertation research involving fMRI-guided TMS to assess the role of early visual regions during confident false memories for visual information. Posted 11/22/16.
M. E. Panero, along with Hiram Brownell, Ellen Winner, and researchers from other universities combined forces and found that the widely reported claim that a brief episode of reading fiction boosts theory of mind does not replicate. Posted 10/11/16.
Lauren Anderson was awarded the Student Poster Award for the best poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Pavlovian Society. Posted 10/4/16.
Sarah Kark has a new publication with Scott Slotnick and Elizabeth Kensinger entitled "Repetition Enhancement of Amygdala and Visual Cortex Functional Connectivity Reflects Nonconscious Memory for Negative Visual Stimuli" in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Posted 9/29/16.
Jim Russell and colleagues published an article, "The Fear Gasping Face as a Threat Display in a Small-Scale Melanesian Society," in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Science). Posted 9/19/16.
Maureen Ritchey received an R00 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health: "Emotional modulation of human memory processes and cortico-hippocampal systems." Posted 9/16/16.
Elizabeth Kensinger and Ehri Ryu, in collaboration with Angela Gutchess at Brandeis University, have been awarded an R21 grant from the National Institute on Aging to study "Mechanisms supporting encoding of self-referential and emotional information with age." Posted 9/16/16.
Joshua Hartshorne has received a three-year NSF grant entitled, "CompCog: Large-scale, empirically based, publicly accessible database of argument structure to support experimental and computational research." Posted 8/24/16.
A recent publication by Michelle Hurst and Sara Cordes was featured in an issue of APA PeePs(Particularly Exciting Experiments in Psychology). Posted 8/19/16.
Liane Young received a three-year grant from NSF entitled, "Social cognition for competition versus cooperation." Posted 8/3/16.
Joshua Hartshorne and Katherine McAuliffe received the American Psychological Foundation’s 2016 Esther Katz Rosen Fund Grant. This grant will fund a summer research experiences program for high schoolers next summer. Posted 7/20/16.
Liane Young and former doctoral student Laura Niemi have an op-ed on victim blaming in The New York Times June 26. Posted 6/27/16.
Kelly Bennion and members of Mike Chee's laboratory at Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School have published a new paper entitled "Sleep restriction can attenuate prioritization benefits on declarative memory consolidation" in the Journal of Sleep Research. Posted 6/23/16.
Kelly Bennion and Elizabeth Kensinger have published a new paper entitled "The impact of napping on memory for future-relevant stimuli: Prioritization among multiple salience cues" in the journal Behavioral Neuroscience. Posted 6/15/16.
John Christianson has been awarded an NIMH R21 grant entitled Stressor controllability, resilience and prefrontal endocannabinoids. The project will begin July 1 and run for two years, with total costs in excess of $430,000. Posted 6/6/16.
Congratulations to the Psychology majors who were inducted into Phi Beta Kappa on Sunday, May 22nd, 2016: Daniel Cho, Kerri Keeler, Cara Lucke, Morgan McGoey, Scott Rizzi, Mary Sarlitto, Andrew Seto, Caitlin Slotter, and Andrew Stone. These students join others in the Boston College chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, Omicron of Massachusetts, and include the very best scholars in the College of Arts and Sciences. Posted 5/25/16.
Sara Cordes, in collaboration with Hilary Barth and Andrea Patalano at Wesleyan University, has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation on the "Foundations of Quantitative Thought: Number, Space, Time, and Probability." Posted 5/19/16.
Ellen Winner and Sara Cordes (along with Jill Hogan, who co-authored the grant and directs the project) have been awarded a two-year Research: Artworks grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support their study on the effects of intensive orchestral music training on children's executive functioning, affective development, and school liking. Posted 5/11/16.
Katie McAuliffe's 2011 paper "'I had so much it didn't seem fair' Eight-year-olds reject two forms of inequity" in Cognition is listed as one of the most cited articles in this journal since 2011. Posted 5/3/16.
Kelly Dumais, graduate student in Alexa Veenema's lab, is the 2016 recipient of the Donald and Helene White Dissertation Award for the best dissertation in the field of social sciences. Posted 5/2/16.
Jessica Karanian won the Donald J. White Teaching Excellence Award. Posted 4/28/16.
Laura Niemi won a poster award from the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society for her dissertation's fMRI research. She will present this work at the SANS conference this month. Posted 4/13/16.
Gorica Petrovich has been appointed to serve on the Neurobiology of Motivated Behavior Study Section, Center for Scientific Review at NIH, from July 1, 2016 until June 30, 2022. Posted 4/11/16.
Barry Schneider has just published the second edition of his book, Childhood Friendships and Peer Relations: Friends and Enemies (2nd Edition), New York, Routledge 2016. Posted 4/11/16.
Ellen Winner objects to Boston Globe art critic Sebastian Smee's characterization of child art in a letter to the editor of the Boston Globe. Posted 4/4/16.
Gene Heyman and two recent BC undergraduates, Katherine Grisanzio from Psychology and Victor Liang from Chemistry, published a paper titled Introducing a method for calculating the allocation of attention in Frontiers in Cognition. Posted 3/29/16.
Morgan Rogers, a student in the lab of John Christianson, was awarded a 2016 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Program Fellowship. Posted 3/29/16.
John Christianson is named the Gianinno Family Sesquicentennial Assistant Professor in recognition of excellence in research, teaching, and service. Posted 3/10/16.
A commentary by Josh Hartshorne and others was published in Science. A response to a different commentary that argued replicability in psychology is high, this commentary shows that the original conclusion depends on several conceptual and mathematical errors. Posted 3/8/16.
Caroline Smith received honorable mention for the 2016 AIBS Emerging Public Policy Leadership Award. Posted 3/4/16.
Sara Keefer, Sindy Cole, and Gorica Petrovich published a paper in the journal Physiology & Behavior entitled "Orexin/hypocretin receptor 1 signaling mediates Pavlovian cue-food conditioning and extinction." Posted 3/3/16.
Sara Cordes and Alexa Veenema have both been granted tenure and will be promoted to Associate Professor. Congratulations Sara and Alexa! Posted 2/22/16.
According to Altmetrics, a service which tracks the volume of mainstream media and Internet discussion of journal articles, Gene Heyman’s publication: Addiction and Choice: Theory and new data, ranks in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Altmetrics and in the 98th percentile of publications of the same age. Posted 2/11/16.
Thalia Goldstein, Boston College Psychology Ph.D. 2010, former student of Ellen Winner and now assistant professor at Pace University, has been awarded APA Division 10’s Daniel E. Berlyne Award for Outstanding Research by an Early Career Scholar. This award is in recognition of her research on acting and performance, as well as on the topics of pretence, play and imagination. Posted 2/8/16.
Liane Young has won the 2016 Stanton Prize, awarded annually by the Society for Philosophy and Psychology to "a young scholar who has made significant contributions to interdisciplinary research in philosophy, psychology, and/or related disciplines and who has been active in the Society for Philosophy and Psychology." Posted 2/7/16. [More in BC News]
Barry Schneider is the 2016 recipient of the Buhrmester Memorial Award for Career Contributions to Research by the Society for Research on Adolescence. Posted 2/3/16.
Josh Hartshorne was awarded an NSF grant to support a one-day workshop he is co-organizing this spring called Events in Language and Cognition. Posted 1/22/16.
Karen Rosen published a new book, Social and Emotional Development: Attachment Relationships and the Emerging Self (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Posted 1/19/16.
Katie McAuliffe's research on how fairness develops in seven cultures is published in Nature. This research was featured in the recent Arts and Sciences e-newsletter from the Dean. Posted 1/7/16.
Josh Hartshorne's article in Psychological Science is one of the five most viewed articles in 2015. Posted 1/5/16.