The UMass Eyetracking Lab
The UMass Eyetracking Lab (aka the Staub Lab) had a busy and productive 2024-2025. Kuan-Jung Huang completed his PhD in summer 2024. His thesis investigated the circumstances under which Chinese readers recognize multiple characters in a single glance. Kuan-Jung is now an NSF-funded postdoctoral scholar at the University of Maryland. New PhD student Ryan Buggy joined the lab in fall 2024, coming to UMass from The Reading League, a nonprofit organization that works to improve implementation of the science of reading in the classroom. Since arriving at UMass, Ryan has been working on a large-scale replication project that evaluates competing theoretical accounts of how a word’s predictability (as measured using a large language model such as GPT-2) influences reading. The project assesses whether the relationship between a word’s predictability and the time the eyes spend on the word is linear or logarithmic; if predictable words are “pre-activated” during reading, a linear function is expected, but if predictable words are simply more easily understood, a logarithmic function is expected.
Much of our other current work is focused on understanding readers’ failure to notice certain kinds of errors in the text, such as repeated, omitted, or transposed function words. Readers’ tendency to miss these errors suggests rapid integration of “top-down” and “bottom up” sources of information. We have been carrying out both behavioral and eye movement experiments, investigating what factors modulate how often errors are overlooked and the relationship between failing to notice an error and readers’ eye movements. This year, several undergraduate research assistants in the lab were co-authors on published or submitted papers on this topic. Harper McMurray and Anthony Wickett co-authored with Adrian Staub a paper that appeared in Cognitive Psychology (“Perceptual inference corrects function word errors in reading: Errors that are not noticed do not disrupt eye movements”), and Alan Chen, Emily Peck, and Tasha Taylor co-authored with Adrian Staub a paper that appeared in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (“Estimating the rate of failure to notice function word errors in natural reading”).
Another set of undergrad research assistants, Ellie Deutsch, John Greene, and Jillian Hammond, are co-authors with Adrian Staub on another recently published paper (“The ‘Sentence Superiority Effect’ is due to guessing”). This paper reports evidence that, contrary to some previous reports, readers are not better able to identify a very briefly presented word when it is presented in a grammatical sentence. In addition to being published in Cognition, this work was also presented at the Psychonomic Society’s Annual Meeting in November 2024.
Current collaborators from other labs include Cory Shain (Stanford), Tamar Gollan (UCSD), Steven Luke (BYU), and Brian Dillon (UMass Linguistics).
Individual Differences in Development Lab (IDDLab)
Overview:
How do we become unique individuals? In IDDLab, we apply statistical modeling strategies to investigate variation in human development from early childhood through adulthood. We conduct research on human development spanning cognition, emotion, behavior, and biology in distinct sociocultural contexts. Current topics include self-regulation, executive function, and behavioral/emotional problems.
Students:
Ann Folker, PhD (March 2025): intra-individual variation in family contexts, links to psychopathology.
Christina Bertrand, PhD (April 2025): physical activity and fitness, links to executive function.
Zola Gong, MS: home and family contexts, links to executive function.
Undergraduate researchers participate in the department’s ADRAP and RAMP programs, the RIDE REU program in the College of Engineering, and the LeeSIP scholars program.
International collaborations:
Parenting Across Cultures/Parents and Adolescents Across Cultures (PAC) with Jennifer Lansford (lead investigator, Duke University) and colleagues in nine countries.
FinnBrain Birth Cohort Study (with Riikka Korja and colleagues at University of Turku, Finland).
The Family Relationships, Affective Science, and Minority Health (FAM) Lab
Our lab aims to better understand how family relationships can yield benefits for mental health among youth from diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds. The lab, directed by Dr. Evelyn Mercado, approaches this topic from a biopsychosocial framework, conducting research that taps into psychological, social, and biological factors influencing the health and well-being of families. One of the primary research studies underway is examining how Latino/a/x parent-youth dyads experience interpersonal and structural racism, and the implications of these experiences on biomarkers of health, such as salivary cortisol and insulin. This study is co-led by Dr. Airín Martínez of the UMass Amherst School of Public Health, who brings her expertise in structural racism and health disparities. Dr. Mercado presented findings from this study as an invited speaker at the 2024 Encuentro Nacional de Psicólogos Infantiles in Querétaro, Mexico where she delivered her presentation in Spanish. In 2024, Dr. Mercado won the CNS Excellence in Undergraduate Student Mentoring award.
Graduate students in the FAM Lab work on ongoing research studies and secondary data analysis. Aylin Fernandez, a third-year graduate student, is using data from the California Families Project to examine the interplay between cultural processes and Spanish use among Latinx mother-child and father-child dyads for her master’s thesis. Senior biology major Jessie Zeng is assessing the social support networks of students of color, using data from a qualitative research study led by FAM Lab alumni Dr. Marielena Barbieri. Undergraduate and graduate students have presented their findings at the Society for Research in Child Development, the Society for Research on Adolescence, and the International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development. FAM Lab projects highlight the effective collaborations between Dr. Mercado, graduate students, and undergraduate research assistants. Psychology major and honors student Roger Hauck and Aylin Fernandez co-lead a team of RAs analyzing ECG and cardiac impedance data collected for a pilot study led by Dr. Mercado that examined biological synchrony across systems (autonomic nervous system, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis) during parent-youth interactions and in response to lab-based stress paradigms. Hauck, a junior psychology major, is conducting his honors thesis using this physiological data, and over the summer he attended a MindWare Technologies training workshop to learn more in-depth techniques on the analysis and collection of cardiac data. First-year graduate student Anamaría Rey-Bollentini is currently developing a scoping review of the existing research on dating violence among Latinx youth. She leads a team of undergraduates from both the FAM Lab and the Vital Lab, who screen papers and meet weekly to discuss whether certain papers meet the review’s objective of identifying culturally relevant protective and risk factors.
Community-engaged research and outreach is a primary focus for the FAM Lab. For the past two semesters, the lab has partnered with the Morning, Movement, and Mentoring Program (MMMP), a before-school program for 6th-8th graders at the Amherst Middle School funded by Amherst Recreation. FAM Lab RAs attend the program multiple times a week to serve as peer mentors, provide homework help, and build strong connections with the students. The FAM Lab also regularly hosts high school students from surrounding communities to tour the lab and do hands-on demonstrations. Most recently, youth leaders from Pa’lante Transformative Justice in Holyoke toured the lab space and had the chance to engage in mock experiment protocols where they played the role of the researcher and gained firsthand experience on how to conduct research studies. In the past, the FAM Lab has teamed up with programs on campus, such as Upward Bound and the Public Health Equity Young Scholars Summer Enrichment Program, to bring youth to campus for a full day to experience the ins and outs of conducting psychological research in the FAM Lab!
FAM Lab Alumni News:
Dr. Stylianos Syropoulos is an incoming assistant professor in the School of Sustainability in the College of Global Futures at Arizona State University. Dr. Marielena Barbieri accepted a position at the Mather Institute in Chicago post-graduation.
Psychotherapy Research Lab
The Constantino group had an exciting and productive year. As director of the Psychotherapy Research Lab, Dr. Constantino’s team completed the initial phase of a large implementation award from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. This work focuses on matching mental health care patients to psychotherapists’ empirically determined strengths. Dr. Constantino also delivered several invited talks on this work, including for the UMass Amherst Institute of Diversity Sciences and Public Interest Technology joint research seminar.
Members of the lab published numerous journal articles and book chapters, highlighted by a paper in the Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy that was given the Psyche Award for Most Valuable Paper on Professional Development. As lead author, Averi Gaines (6th-year graduate student in clinical psychology) published a study in Psychotherapy Research that demonstrated empirically that patients internalize their psychotherapist’s positive regard. Anuj Mehta (2nd-year graduate student in clinical psychology) published a study in Cogent Mental Health, which showed that the psychotherapist’s influence on patients’ outcomes differs by degree of treatment standardization. These papers, among others, are making an impressive impact on the field, along with the lab’s active presence at various conferences, including the annual meeting of the Society for Psychotherapy Research (SPR) in Krakow, Poland.
Special congratulations go out to Averi Gaines for successfully matching to a pre-doctoral clinical internship (Charleston Consortium), winning the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy Lillian Comas-Diaz Student Diversity Paper Award, winning an SPR Conference Travel Award, and being awarded a UMass Graduate School Predissertation Grant. Additional special cheers go out to Anuj Mehta for winning a Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy Student Research Grant and to Catherine Cunningham (the lab’s undergraduate honors student) for winning a Massachusetts Undergraduate Research Conference Poster Printing Grant and a UMass Amherst Commonwealth Honors College Travel Grant. The lab is also excited to welcome our newest graduate student, Lillian Glushka, who comes to us from a post-baccalaureate research position in Washington, DC.
We would also like to acknowledge major accomplishments of a recent alumna, Dr. Alice Coyne (assistant professor at American University). In addition to being named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science, she won the American Psychological Foundation and the APA’s Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy’s Early Career Award and SPR’s Bergin and Garfield Emerging Scholar Award. Finally, we are immensely grateful for the hard work and notable contributions of our undergraduate research assistants and post-baccalaureate volunteers: Anaya Rohira, Kailin Huang, Maddie Valentino, Fabriciana de Soriano, Peehu Chhabra, Amshu Swamy, and Ashton Peters.
We close with the immortal words of Josh Allen: “Be good, do good, God bless, and Go Bills.”
Culture and Morality Lab
Ali Hajian was accepted into the 2025 Summer Institute in Computational Social Science (SICSS), at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. From June 30 to July 11, 2025, the Computational Social Science Lab, Data Driven Discovery Initiative, Population Studies Center, Department of Sociology, Department of Political Science, and Annenberg School for Communication hosted the SICSS-Penn. The purpose of the Summer Institute is to bring together graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty interested in computational social science. The Summer Institute is for both social scientists (broadly conceived) and data scientists (broadly conceived).
Topics covered included causal inference with observational data, text analysis, network analysis, survey experiments, and machine learning. There was ample opportunities for students to discuss their ideas and research with the organizers, other participants, and visiting speakers. Because we are committed to open and reproducible research, all materials created by faculty and students for the Summer Institute will be released open source.
Laurel Ralph, an undergraduate student in the Culture and Morality Lab, won the Berni Leidner Exceptional Achievement Award.
First-year student Fırat Şeker won a travel award from the SCORE Project for Advancing Research on Religion and Cooperation (SPARRC) for the Summer 2025 Methodology Workshop. He attended the workshop on causal inference in religion and cooperation at UCSD. He also won a fellowship from the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics and Culture (ASREC) and attended a graduate student workshop and the annual conference in March.
Cognitive and Developmental Neuroscience Lab
The Cognitive and Developmental Neuroscience Lab (PI: Joonkoo Park) in collaboration with Beth Jakob’s lab in the Department of Biology received CNS Seed Funding to study number sense in jumping spiders. Can spiders compare arrays with different number of items? Can spiders count? Are spiders susceptible to number-related visual illusions that humans are susceptible to? Addressing these questions in a species with a unique vision structure under computationally driven hypotheses will allow us to advance knowledge about quantity processing in animals and to draw parallels with human perception.
The Ready Lab
The Ready Lab—Cognitive, Culture, and Emotion—is excited to be launching a program of research on cognitive and emotional skills and well-being in adults with high-functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Studies will determine how adults with ASD think about and understand emotions. This work is an outgrowth of decades of research on cognition and emotion in older adults and in the context of neurodegenerative diseases.
The Cognitive, Culture, and Emotion Lab also engages in scholarship about training in clinical neuropsychology and assessment, as well as how culture influences brain and behavior relationships. Rebecca Ready is co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology on “Current Practices and Challenges in Providing Doctoral Training in Clinical Neuropsychology.” She is launching a new study to determine the extent to which journal publications in the field of clinical neuropsychology attend to cultural influences on brain function and behavior.
Three students from Ready’s lab earned their doctoral degrees in 2025. Grace Cho’s research centers on the interplay between the social context and suicide risk, with a particular focus on how socio-cognitive processes and interpersonal dynamics contribute to risk among individuals experiencing social marginalization, such as discrimination. Cho is dedicated to understanding how structural inequities increase suicide risk and examining ways to mitigate suicide risk through brief scalable interventions.
Eleni Kapoulea’s dissertation research project is a community-engaged mixed-methods project that aims to identify generational causes of loneliness in Cambodian Americans, an underserved group. Kapoulea’s line of research is dedicated to understanding more about the interface between culture, emotion, and clinical neuropsychology. Irina Orlovsky’s dissertation is a neuroimaging study that will determine age-related differences in neural networks involved in reappraisal, an instrumental emotion regulation strategy. Orlovsky specializes in geriatric clinical neuropsychology and emotion regulation.
Intergroup Relations and Social Justice Lab
Lab Director: Linda R. Tropp
Many exciting activities took place in our lab this year, so we have many updates to share!
First, we wish to extend our congratulations to Dr. Trisha Dehrone (PhD 2025), who successfully defended her dissertation and graduated this spring! Across two large studies—including U.S. national survey data and a field-based intervention she co-designed and implemented with the Trust for Public Land in Chattanooga, TN—Trisha studied how White, Latino, and Black Americans’ feelings of local belonging may be shaped by their experiences with people from other racial and ethnic groups. Overall, she observed that having close, high-quality cross-race experiences contributed to greater feelings of local belonging despite the potential effects of neighborhood ethno-racial composition, recent demographic shifts, or existing levels of racial segregation in their local communities.
We also wish to congratulate lab alum Dr. Brooke Burrows (PhD 2024), who has just completed her first year as an assistant professor of psychology at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC! Brooke has continued to work with our lab on several projects, including a collaboration with More in Common US that included national and regional surveys—and focus groups in Houston, TX; Kansas City, MO; and Pittsburgh, PA, led by Brooke—to understand what underlies Americans’ interest in bridging differences, and barriers that may keep them from getting to know others who differ from them. As summarized by More in Common US in March 2025, most Americans are interested in bridging across many lines of difference—including differences associated with race/ethnicity, political viewpoint, socioeconomic status, and religion— yet they perceive limited opportunities to engage with others across differences, and they often express concern about being rejected or misunderstood were they to try to bridge differences.
Graduate student Liora Morhayim was awarded a Topol Peace Fellowship to work on field research in Hungary with Dr. Luca Váradi, a professor of nationality studies at Central European University. In one line of research, she examined discrimination against Roma people in the Hungarian rental market, including both the pervasiveness and potential causes of this discrimination, and tested interventions aimed at reducing it. Liora and Dr. Váradi were invited to present this work at Eötvös-Loránd University during Liora’s stay in Budapest (shown below). Liora also worked with Dr. Váradi and colleagues on a project investigating how direct contact experiences with members of the Roma community could buffer against the role of peer norms in promoting anti-Roma bias among Hungarian adolescents; this work has recently been published in the International Journal of Intercultural Relations. Liora also co-authored a chapter for the Handbook of Prejudice, Stereotyping, and Discrimination with Dr. Linda Tropp and Dr. Lusine Grigoryan (University of York, UK).
Additionally, after working in the lab for a couple of years, this spring Elena Li completed her undergraduate senior honors thesis. In fall 2024, Elena received a research grant from the Commonwealth Honors College to conduct thesis research on White Americans’ interracial contact experiences and how these relate to their racial prejudices and their willingness to constructively reflect on the actions of their own racial group; she did an excellent job presenting findings at the 31st annual Massachusetts Undergraduate Research Conference (MassURC), and she has graduated from UMass with a joint BS degree in Psychology and Computer Science!
The Work and Family Transitions Project
The WFTP Lab has had a busy year, but we also made time for some fun. Axe throwing was our latest adventure.
Our research team has been working hard on a new pilot grant we received from the Institute of Diversity Sciences. The title of our project is "Work Conditions and Black Mothers’ Perinatal Health" and is a collaboration with Psychological and Brain Sciences and the Elaine Marieb College of Nursing, with graduate student Ciara Venter leading the charge. In addition, Diego Barcala-Delgado received a related grant to extend this project to include Black fathers. We will be conducting focus groups with new parents who are managing parenthood and employment to hear their stories about the challenges and successes of this period. These data will be coupled with a quantitative component of the project that uses a large longitudinal dataset of young parents transitioning to parenthood to explore work conditions as predictors of new parents' health.
The two graduate students in the WFTP Lab have exciting programs of research:
Diego Barcala-Delgado
Diego is a fifth-year doctoral student in the clinical psychology program. His research focuses broadly on how sociocultural factors, such as race, ethnicity, and social class, and structural inequalities, like racism and discrimination, shape parenting and children’s development. Specifically, Diego’s research interests focus on the role of fathers in the family, and what factors promote warm and positive father involvement. In addition, he is interested in the interface between work and family, with a specific interest in how fathers’ work role and job conditions influence parenting and child outcomes. He was a recent recipient of the Rayner Award, which allows him to explore fathers’ experiences juggling work and new parenthood.
Barcala-Delgado, D. I., & Perry-Jenkins, M. (2025). Father Engagement in Low-Income Families: The Role of Workplace Characteristics and Gender Roles. Journal of Family and Economic Issues.
Ciara Venter
Ciara is a third-year doctoral student in the clinical psychology program and is interested in the perinatal mental health of women of color. She is also interested in understanding the Superwoman Schema as a potential explanatory factor in shaping Black mothers’ experiences with postpartum depression and other perinatal mood disorders. Ciara recently published her first paper, which explored the impact of life stressors on postpartum depressive symptoms among Black and Latina mothers and whether social support and personal mastery served as protective factors. In addition, Ciara started working as an intern for an intervention led by the UMass Chan Medical School that is exploring whether partnerships between healthcare providers and community-based teams can improve care and reduce symptoms of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders among marginalized populations.
Venter, C. S., Barcala-Delgado, D. I., & Perry-Jenkins, M. (2025). Life Events and Postpartum Depressive Symptoms Among Black and Latina Mothers: The Role of Protective Factors. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry.
Two of our undergraduate seniors graduated in spring 2025. Grace Bono has joined the MSW program at Stony Brook University, and Nya Mielke is pursuing her MSW at Boston University. They will be missed, and we are so proud of them!
Alumni Updates:
Christina Rowley is a 2024 PhD graduate and was a recent recipient of the University of California Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Alexandrea Craft, a 2019 PhD graduate, is an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior (research) at Brown University. She is a recent recipient of the prestigious NIH Director’s Early Independence Award, which provides five years of funding to conduct an independent research project.
Katie Newkirk, a 2018 graduate of our clinical PhD program, just started a new job as director of evidence- based practices at the Child Health and Development Institute of Connecticut.
LA VIDA (Latinx Adolescents’ Values, Identity, Development, and Adjustment) Lab
The LA VIDA (Latinx Adolescents’ Values, Identity, Development, and Adjustment) Lab is led by Mindy Gonzales-Backen and focuses on understanding the socioemotional development of Latinx adolescents through a cultural lens. Specifically, we examine cultural, familial, and contextual factors that play a role in development and adjustment among Latinx youth. Currently, we have two broad streams of research. First, the Latinx Youth Study examines the socioemotional adjustment of Latinx youth living in rural communities. Additionally, SOLAA (Study of Latinx Academic Achievement), led by postdoc Deziah Bermudez, is focused on cultural and familial predictors of academic achievement among Latinx college students.
Our lab has published the following manuscripts in the past academic year and several others are under review or in development.
Publications:
• Bermudez, D. L., Garcia, M. E., Iturriaga, V. F., Rodriguez, R. E., & Gonzales-Backen, M. (2025). Latinx youth in rural settings: Understanding the links between ethnic-racial identity, neighborhood risks, perceived discrimination, and depressive symptoms. Journal of Adolescence, 97(4), 1103–1112.
• Cruz, B., Meca, A., Wright, A., Veniegas, T. K., Allison, K. K., Santibanez, L., Scurry, M., & Gonzales-Backen, M. (2024). Examining the role of identity development and cultural stressors in the establishment of a US identity among Hispanic/Latinx college students. Journal of Latinx Psychology, 12, 245-260.
• Zhang, J. & Gonzales-Backen, M. (2024). The association between acculturative stress and rule-breaking behaviors among Latinx adolescents in rural areas: A moderated mediation analysis. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 30, 425-433.
In addition to publications, research from the LA VIDA Lab was presented at multiple national conferences. Specifically, Bermudez presented studies she led at the National Council for Family Relations (NCFR) Annual Meeting and the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) Biennial Meeting.
Members of the LA VIDA Lab were recognized with national awards this year. Specifically, Gonzales-Backen won the Felix Berardo Scholarship Award for Mentoring from NCFR. Additionally, Bermudez won the SRCD Biennial Early Career Travel Award.
In the upcoming year we will continue our work focused on examining cultural and familial stressors and strengths that contribute to well-being among Latinx youth and emerging adults. We look forward to collaborating on a large multisite data collection with investigators at universities across the United States. Also, we hope to continue to build the lab by inviting undergraduate students to get involved!
The Disability, Inclusion, and Community Engagement (DICE) Lab
Third-year developmental science doctoral student Tihitina (Titi) Bekele successfully defended her master’s thesis, titled “Moderating Effects of Autistic Traits on the Relationship Between Parenting and Child Emotional Regulation.” This study was presented at the Society for Research in Child Development and has been published in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. We also congratulate Titi on successfully passing her comprehensive exams, for which she conducted a systematic review “Assessing the Parent-Child Relationship in Autistic Children Across Cultures: A Systematic Review of Methodologies.”
Clinical psychology doctoral student Elodie Carel hit the ground running in their first year. They delivered a webinar for the Autism and Developmental Disability Special Interest Group for the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies titled “Research Is for Everyone: Addressing Accessibility Barriers in Academic Presentations.” They published two manuscripts this year, including their undergraduate thesis titled “Associations of dynamic versus static disability with experiences of stigma and mental health” and one from their post-bac fellowship titled “‘I bet being trans in the Netherlands is like living in the future’: Could the Netherlands serve as an imperfect ‘gold standard’ comparator for transgender youth research in the United States?”
We had four amazing students successfully design, implement, and defend their honors theses! In no particular order, Lindsey Bratter (Psychology '25) conducted the study “Understanding the Link Between Children’s Prosocial Behavior and Attitudes Toward Disability” with second through sixth graders, with the support of research assistants Abi Keefe, Kaitlin Flaherty, Rachel Pous, and Ryan McGillicuddy.
Katelyn Horan (Biology '25) completed “Assessing the Attitudes, Perceptions, and Knowledge of Premedical Students About Disability: Implications for Medical Education and Practice” with the assistance of Noy Toledano, Abby Beardsley, and many other members of the DICE Lab.
Emma Pike-Stein (Public Health '25) conducted a systematic literature review titled “Breaking Silence: The Intersection of Disability and Interpersonal Trauma,” with the assistance of Meghan Hausser, Sidney Adams, and Hannah Ly.
Last but not least, Caroline Pare conducted the study “The Influence of Family Structure on the Outcomes of Parents Raising Children with Disabilities: A Systematic Literature Review” with the assistance of Gianna Smith, Tommy Tan, and Keira Johnson. Dani Wagner collected pilot data for their upcoming thesis (2025-2026) “Evaluating the efficacy of a crafting activity for autistic adults on improving affect, quality of life, and social connectedness.”
These students, along with other members of the UMass community, presented their research at the second annual Neurodiversity and Disability Studies Summit. This event was co-hosted by the DICE Lab, the Boltwood Project, and the Developmental Disabilities and Human Services program.
Affect and Social Cognition Lab
Our lab investigates how emotions influence what we think, how we think, and how we behave. Our current work, supported by a recently completed grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, examines how emergency physicians’ and nurses’ emotions influence their clinical reasoning, decision making, and behavior—particularly when treating emotionally evocative patients and those with stigmatizing conditions (e.g., mental health disorders, substance use disorders). Leading an interdisciplinary team of researchers and clinicians from psychology, education, emergency medicine, nursing, and patient safety, we identify cognitive and affective factors that contribute to medical and diagnostic errors as well as poor-quality patient care. We use a mixed methods approach, including qualitative interviews with emergency physicians, nurses, and patients, and experimental studies in which clinicians assess patients in highly controlled, computer-simulated encounters.
In a new study launched this year, we moved our work directly into the emergency department to investigate physicians’ real-time emotional and physiological reactions during their encounters with patients. We are examining how these responses relate to clinical judgments and decisions, as captured in patients’ electronic health records, particularly when clinicians treat patients who are emotionally evocative, stigmatized, or impacted by well-known healthcare disparities. Research fellow Aline Castro shadowed emergency physicians for over 500 hours and collected emotional, physiological, and observational data during nearly 1,000 patient encounters. Together with our qualitative and experimental studies, this rich dataset will provide insights into how physicians’ emotions influence patient care, and will provide the groundwork for developing, testing, and implementing interventions to reduce emotion- and stigma-induced risks to patient safety.
In addition to many collaborators outside UMass Amherst, graduate student Jasna Hardin, PharmD; recent lab graduate Dr. Nathan Huff; postdoctoral fellow Dr. Guanyu Liu; and an outstanding team of undergraduate research assistants and honors students contributed significantly to our research this past year. Three honors students presented research at the Massachusetts Undergraduate Research Conference, highlighting physicians’ emotional responses to different vulnerable patient populations. Keerti Daesety focused on unhoused patients, Clement Carson on patients with substance use disorders, and Tarunima Agarwal on patients who do not speak English and those from racial minority groups. Dr. Guanyu Liu also presented research at the Association for Psychological Science Convention in Washington, DC. For her master’s thesis, Jasna Hardin launched a new project examining how healthcare insurance status may influence the quality of care patients receive in the emergency department, hypothesizing that negative stereotypes and emotions toward uninsured and Medicaid patients may contribute to disparities in care.
We are incredibly proud of our lab alumni, who have achieved success in healthcare, clinical psychology, public health, and related fields. Our former undergraduates include seven currently in medical school (Janvi Nanavati, David Cellucci, Isabelle Levesque, Kamran Noori-Shirazi, Maria DelPico, Anthony Wickett, and Matthew Bird). Two others, Zoe Geannopoulos and Hajar Traiba, recently graduated from medical school. Other undergraduate lab alumni are currently in PhD programs in educational psychology (Van Le) and clinical psychology (Fiona Sleight and Kendall Beals). Julia Tager completed her PhD in clinical psychology this spring, Sahana Sule recently earned her master’s degree in public health, and Tarunima Agarwal began an MPH program. Former graduate student Dr. Nathan Huff is now a lecturer in the psychology department at Gonzaga University, where he continues to publish work that he conducted at UMass and collaborate on ongoing research.
Violence & Trauma Across the Lifespan (ViTAL) Lab
We are the Violence & Trauma Across the Lifespan (ViTAL) Lab, directed by Maria M. Galano. Our team is composed of four graduate students—Minji Lee, Ana Uribe, Kristin Howell, and Anamaria Rey Bollentini— and thirteen undergraduate RAs. Using a community-based approach, our goal is to understand the effects of domestic violence and traumatic stress on the well-being of children and adults from diverse backgrounds. We recently wrapped up a study helping us learn more about the intergenerational impact of caregiver trauma and violence on preschoolers’ development and presented preliminary results at a conference.
Through support from a UMass Public Service Endowment grant, we are currently partnering with Alianza, a Holyoke-based domestic violence agency, to explore barriers to service engagement among Latina survivors of intimate partner violence and the culturally specific needs of Latina survivors. We also have several exciting student-led projects related to dissertations, master’s theses, and honors theses.
Community outreach is very important in our work, and we have been fortunate to collaborate with Alianza and Square One of Springfield, a nonprofit social services organization. Through outreach, we network with local organizations, spread awareness of the effects of violence on well-being, and recruit participants for current studies.
We are also eager to highlight some of the exciting things our team and alumni have been up to! Many of our graduate students have applied and been selected to receive various departmental awards. These awards include the PBS Service Award, won by Kristin Howell (2025), and the Wendy Helmer Memorial Award, a peer-nominated grant, won by Ana Uribe (2025) and Minji Lee (2024).
Within the past year, our lab has also attended various conferences. Several of our team members (Lee, Uribe, Howell, and Dr. Galano) presented at the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) conference in fall 2024. Additionally, this past May Dr. Galano presented at the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) on a panel on leadership from an equity-based perspective and gave an invited talk at the Association for Psychological Science (APS) on “Investigating the Effects of Violence and Trauma on Families Using a Health Equity Lens.”
Since graduating, our alumni have gone on to do many exciting things, such as attending medical school, law school, physician assistant school, or other graduate programs. Also, our post-bac RA and recent grad Julianna Rocha (Dec. 24) was accepted to the Behavioral Health Service Corps at William James College to start her path toward a mental health service career. We want to give a shout-out to Yana Deeley (22) and Lanelle Garcia (24), two of our alumni, for recently completing their Master of Social Work at Boston University, and Master of Public Health at UMass Amherst, respectively. Congratulations to you and all of our fantastic alumni!