Fall 2022 Newsletter | Awards and Updates

Doctoral Dissertation Defenses

Jon Burnsky, What did you Expect? An Investigation of Lexical Preactivation in Sentence Processing, Advisor: Adrian Staub

Alexandrea Craft, It’s not Black & White: Relationship Quality Within Interracial Couples, Advisor: Maureen Perry-Jenkins

Jasmine Dixon, Discrimination and Cognition in Midlife Black Women: The Protective Roles of Social Support and Religiosity/Spirituality, Advisor: Rebecca Ready

Sungha Kang, Racial Differences in Parent-Teacher Perceptions of Childhood ADHD Symptoms: An Examination of the Role of Stereotypes and Prejudice, Advisor: Elizabeth Harvey

Shannon Gair, Bidirectional Effects of Parent Emotion Socialization and Child Emotion Expression During Dyadic Interactions, Advisor: Elizabeth Harvey

Joel Ginn, The Roles of Identity and Beliefs about Social Change in Decision Making Processes for Identity-Laden Social Change Efforts, Advisor: Brian Lickel

Brien Goodwin, Interpersonal Process Differentiating Patient-Therapist Dyads with High Versus Low Convergence in Alliance Ratings, Advisor: Michael Constantino

Sarah McCormick, Familial and Environmental Contributions to Child Theory of Mind Development, Advisor: Kirby Deater-Deckard

Quinnehtukqut McLamore, Negotiation and Peacemaking in Conflict Narratives: The Influence of Narrative Reminders of Peacemaking on Zero-sum Beliefs and Attitudes in Protracted Conflicts, Advisor: Bernhard Leidner

Master's Thesis Defenses

Johanny Castillo, Changing Criteria: What Decision Processes Reveal about Confidence in Memory, Advisor: Jeffrey Starns

Katie Gonzalez, Self-Narration, Prefrontal Cortex Functional Connectivity, and Psychopathology in Early Childhood, Advisor: Adam Grabell

Parker Longwell, Predicting Reappraisal Success with Innate Neural Connectivity Across the Adult Lifespan, Advisor: Rebecca Ready

Irina Orlovsky, The Role of Autobiographical Memory in Late-Life Emotion Regulation, Advisor: Bruna Martins-Klein

Tejas Savalia, "Leap before you look”: Conditions that promote implicit visuomotor adaptation without explicit learning, Advisor: David Huber

Awards and Honors

Nilanjana Dasgupta has been honored with the title of Provost Professor, recognizing exceptional achievement in research.

Bernhard Leidner and Heather Richardson have been promoted to Professor. 

Joseph Bergan and Allecia Reid have been promoted to Associate Professor.

Averi Gaines, a 4th year graduate student in the clinical psychology program and Psychotherapy Research Lab, was awarded the 2022 Jeffrey E. Barnett Psychotherapy Research Paper Award from Division 29 (Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy) of the American Psychological Association. Her paper was titled, "Patient-therapist expectancy convergence and outcome in naturalistic psychotherapy."

Alice Coyne, an alumna of the clinical psychology program and Psychotherapy Research Lab, was named Associate Editor of the open access journal, Cogent Mental Health.

Developmental Science PhD student Sarah McCormick defended her dissertation in May 2022, titled “Familial and Environmental Contributions to Child Theory of Mind Development”, in which she presented results from four studies investigating the interactions between aspects of the family and home environment on the behavioral development of theory of mind and the neural structures that support this skill in early childhood. Two of the studies were published this year in Social Development and British Journal of Developmental Psychology. Dr. McCormick began a postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of Dr. Laurel Gabard-Durnam at Northeastern University, with funding from Northeastern University’s Future Faculty Fellowship program.