The Rayner Fund supports something Keith valued highly: graduate student research. Awards from the endowment support research expenses including equipment purchases, data collection, professional travel, or summer stipends. We are proud of the Rayner Fund, and of the student research it supports. The more the endowment grows, the more can be awarded each year.
Award Recipients
2024
Yun Zou, a third-year student in the Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience Program working with Dr. Alexandra Jesse, was awarded the ninth annual Keith Rayner Memorial Graduate Student Research Award. His project, titled Adjusting to “foreign accents”: Change in perception or flexibility, will investigate how native English speakers cope with mispronounced speech sounds in nonnative accents. More precisely, it aims to test whether adaptation to mispronounced sounds involves changes at the perceptual level (i.e., adjusting phonetic representation for a mispronounced sound) or at a post-perceptual level that entails improvement in the flexibility of speech sound interpretation. This project will further our understanding of the mechanisms underlying nonnative accent adaptation and provide insights into developing effective strategies to improve comprehension of nonnative speech.
Diego Barcala-Delgado, a fourth-year student in the Clinical Psychology Program working with Dr. Maureen Perry-Jenkins, was the runner-up for the ninth annual Keith Rayner Memorial Graduate Student Research Award. His project, titled Black Mother’s Perinatal Mental Health: Contributions from Black Fathers’ Work and Mental Health, seeks to integrate qualitative and quantitative methodologies to understand (a) the associations between Black fathers’ and mothers' perinatal mental health, and (b) whether Black fathers’ work conditions influence Black mothers' mental health. Study findings will help to illustrate how early work conditions affect Black fathers’ and mothers’ perinatal mental health – illustrating potential areas to intervene at work and policy levels.
2023
Averi Gaines, a fourth-year student in the Clinical Psychology Program working with Dr. Michael Constantino, was awarded the eighth annual Keith Rayner Memorial Graduate Student Research Award. Her project, titled Relative Valuing of Psychotherapist Characteristics and Performance Data Among People of Color, will help the field combat uniformity myths and responsively situate the prospective use of therapist effectiveness data within appropriate cultural contexts. Study findings will also provide organizations with precise guidelines for when and how to make therapist assignments in a manner that is responsive to the preferences of patients with marginalized racial/ethnic identities.
2022
Kuan-Jung Huang , a fourth-year student in the Cognitive Psychology program working with Dr. Adrian Staub, was awarded the seventh annual Keith Rayner Memorial Graduate Student Research Award. His project, titled Morphosyntactic processing of compound words in Chinese reading, will examine the dynamic between two processes for visual recognition of complex words: direct form-meaning mapping and composition of sub-constituents, and test whether morphosyntactic structure and frequency of the word matter. The understanding will have implications for language learning (how writing systems shape our mental dictionary) and sentence processing (whether Chinese readers rapidly utilize morphosyntactic cues for online word segmentation).
2021
Stylianos Syropoulos , a third-year student in the Psychology of Peace and Violence concentration in the Social Psychology program working with Dr. Bernhard Leidner, was awarded the sixth annual Keith Rayner Memorial Graduate Student Research Award. His project, titled “De-polarizing" American Society: Emphasizing Intergroup Similarities versus Differences as a Mechanism for Decreasing Political Polarization and Hostility, will study whether an emphasis on the dissemination of psychological findings with a focus on intergroup similarities, and not differences, as is the norm of the field, can promote harmony and cooperation between Republican and Democrats. The ultimate goal of the project is to highlight ways through which the dissemination of psychological research can depolarize the American electorate.
2020
Quinnehtukqut McLamore, a fourth-year student in the Psychology of Peace and Violence concentration of the Social Psychology program working with Dr. Bernhard Leidner, was awarded the fifth annual Keith Rayner Memorial Graduate Student Research Award. Their project, Challenge and Threat Framings of COVID-19 Messaging and Downstream Consequences, will investigate how messaging about the coronavirus affects how the stressor of the pandemic is processed, and downstream effects on both compliance with precautionary measures (e.g., social distancing) and xenophobia toward Asians and Asian Americans.
2019
Sarah Winokur, a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Neuroscience and Behavior Program working with Dr. Mariana Pereira, was awarded the fourth annual Keith Rayner Memorial Graduate Student Research Award. Sarah’s research utilizes animal models of depression to identify the neurobiological mechanisms of postpartum depression that most impact parenting. Sarah’s project, Evaluating Estradiol Fluctuations Across Pregnancy in a Rat Model of Postpartum Depression, will offer insights into the role of reproductive hormones in postpartum depression and associated deficits in parenting abilities.
2018
Patrick Sadil, a fourth-year student in the Cognitive Psychology Program working with Dr. Rosie Cowell, was awarded the third annual Keith Rayner Memorial Graduate Student Research Award. Data from Patrick’s project, Visual Recollection: filling in the blanks for non-declarative information, will test key assumptions underlying theories that attempt to explain how people recognize something that they have encountered before -- such as a person, an object, or a context. These results will offer insight into the relationship between the kinds of processes that support recognition and the kinds of information used during those processes.
2017
Alice Coyne, a fourth-year student in the Clinical Psychology Program working with Dr. Michael Constantino, was awarded the second annual Keith Rayner Memorial Graduate Student Research Award. Data from Alice's project, Explaining the “Therapist Effect:” Determinants of Between-Therapist Differences in Alliance Quality and the Alliance-Outcome Association, will be used to develop an empirically-supported therapist training manual. Such work is likely to reflect an improvement on current training practices, as there is currently no evidence that therapist effectiveness improves with experience or following traditional “top-down” theoretical trainings.
2016
Fiona Ge, a fourth-year student in the Social Psychology Program working with Dr. Paula Pietromonaco, was awarded the first annual Keith Rayner Memorial Graduate Student Research Award. Fiona's project, Cultural Differences in Communication and Consequences for Romantic Relationship Quality, has implications for identifying culture-specific communication strategies that promote better relationship functioning, thereby informing interventions that can be tailored to couples from different cultural backgrounds.