The psychology major at Williams College attracts a very large number of students with diverse interests, goals, and backgrounds. Our students follow a curriculum that teaches them not only about what we know about mind and behavior, but also about how we know it, using experiential teaching as our core pedagogy. Students learn how to use the methods of scientific inquiry to critically evaluate information, generate new knowledge and imagine its implications and applications in the world. Students take a range of courses spanning the sub-disciplines of neuroscience, cognitive, clinical, developmental, and social psychology, as well as the psychology of education.

Psychology students have multiple opportunities to conduct research collaboratively with professors. Some of these are empirical projects conducted within required 300-level lab courses, and others are in work-study or research assistant positions or as more formal independent studies. Also, in 2010-2011, nine students completed year-long senior honors thesis research under the direction of Psychology faculty, on topics such as “My Wish is Your Command: Associations between Subclinical Narcissism and Impression Management,” “Temperamental Fearfulness and Proneness to Anger and Physiological Response to Loss of Social Contingency in Infants and Preschoolers,” “The Magnitude Effect on the Discounting of the Utility of Delayed Rewards,” and “Let’s Not, and Say We Would: The Discrepancy between Imagined and Real Responses to Homophobia.” Their projects are listed in the Student Abstracts section of this report.

Department events this year included student/faculty/family picnics, an evening program on “Graduate Study in Psychology”, and a wine and cheese reception to celebrate honors thesis presentations in the Psychology Lounge. A group of our majors organized a new club, P.S.Y.K. (“Psychology Students Yearning for Knowledge”), and had frequent meetings this spring to discuss recent journal articles. To encourage students to explore careers in psychology, the Class of 1960 Scholars Program brought accomplished researchers from other colleges and universities to campus to give colloquia. In advance of the colloquia, the group of 1960 Scholars read and discussed the speakers’ work with a faculty member and then joined the speaker and faculty for dinner afterward. A highlight this year was the visit of Daniel Schacter from Harvard. The 2010-2011 Class of 1960 Scholars are listed below. This year marked the fourth year of the G. Stanley Hall Prize in Psychology, funded by a generous gift from the Chuzi family, parents of Sarah Chuzi ’07, and given at graduation to a student who has demonstrated exceptional achievement in psychology. We were happy to award the prize to our two top students, who shared the prize: Joshua Wilson’11 and Johannes Wilson’11.

Class of 1960 Scholars in Psychology

The faculty of the Psychology Department continued their varied and productive teaching and research programs, as detailed below. We note with pride Laurie Heatherington’s winning the Distinguished Contribution to Family Systems Research Award from the American Family Therapy Association. We were happy to welcome back our colleague Ari Solomon as a visitor. Ari introduced a new course this year, Advanced Topics in Personality, which will be offered again next year. Also arriving next year will be Kate Stroud, a clinical psychologist coming to us from her postdoctoral training at Northwestern University. Kate’s research on depression in adolescence will be an important contribution to the range of our teaching in the clinical psychology subfield. Also joining us next year will be Carin Perilloux from the University of Texas at Austin. Carin’s area of research is evolutionary psychology, and she will be teaching that approach to psychological issues as well as contributing to the social psychology subfield. Through all of these activities as well, we could not function without the invaluable help of C.J. Gillig, Psychology Department Technical Assistant, and Beth Stachelek, Department Administrative Assistant. Their wisdom and cheerfulness, as well as ability to step in, often at the last minute, to support our work, is well-known to students from Introductory Psychology through senior honors thesis students, and they help keep our large department feeling friendly and accessible. It is deeply appreciated by faculty as well.

Professor Phebe Cramer attended the national meeting of the Society for Personality Assessment in Boston, Massachusetts in March, where she presented a paper “Longitudinal Personality Change: The Role of Defense Mechanisms and IQ.” She also served as a discussant for the Symposium “TAT Defense Mechanisms with Diverse Samples and Methods”, and attended a meeting of the Consulting Editors for the Journal of Personality Assessment.

Professor Cramer continues her research on life-span development of personality, with a special interest in defense mechanisms and narcissism. In this area, she has published two new papers: “Attachment Styles and Defense Mechanisms in Parents who Abuse their Children” (with Francis Kelly), and “Young Adult Narcissism: A 20 Year Longitudinal Study of the Contribution of Parenting Styles, Preschool Precursors of Narcissism, and Denial.” She has recently begun a collaborative research project with Dr. Lily Rothschild (Univ. of Haifa) to study the use of defense mechanisms in anorexic patients and a matched control group.

Jennifer Randall Crosby explored several aspects of intergroup interaction with a growing lab that included three thesis students, an independent study student, and 13 undergraduate research assistants who acted as experimenters, research confederates, and data coders. With thesis student Johannes Wilson’11, Professor Crosby examined the divide between how people think they will respond to anti-gay discrimination, and how they actually respond. With thesis student Madeline King’11 and Professor Ken Savitsky, Professor Crosby explored the experience of minority individuals in situations where they are the only member of their group, and when the conversation topic is related to their group membership (such as Black students in a conversation about affirmative action), finding that minority individuals in these situation experienced a sense of being “in the spotlight.” With thesis student Sa-Kiera Hudson’11, Professor Crosby explored how power and group membership affect the ability of individuals to make predictions about the preferences of others. In an Independent Study project with Su-Mai Lin ’2011, Professor Crosby investigated the influence of Black and White individuals in conversations about affirmative action.

In addition to on-campus research activities, Professor Crosby was chosen to present her research at the Franklin & Marshall Emerging Scholars Symposium on Identity in February of 2011. Professor Crosby acted as a reviewer for Psychological Science, Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and attended the meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) in San Antonio, TX.

This past year, Senior Lecturer Susan Engel published three more op-ed pieces in the New York Times, one of them with Marlene Sandstrom. She also published a piece in the Teachers College Record on new ways to measure what children learn in school. She made a presentation to Arne Duncan’s senior staff at the Department of Education in Washington DC on the educational needs of young children. She gave a series of lectures and readings in conjunction with her new book, Red Flags or Red Herrings: Predicting Who Your Child Will Become, published in February 2011 by Simon and Schuster, including an appearance on Good Morning America.

Professor Engel organized a conference which met in October 2011, in Chicago and was funded by the Spencer Foundation. Sixteen developmental psychologists gathered to devise new ways to measure what children learn in school. Madeline Wendt’11 helped coordinate and attended the meeting. Susan supervised Laura Corona’s honors thesis, in which they examined the dinner table conversations of families with children ages five and nine, to find out what kinds of questions children ask and hear when they are at home. She also supervised research by Maddy Wendt looking at how parental ambitions for children change as their children age.

During her fall 2011 sabbatical, Professor Engel served as the Director of Learning and Teaching for a public school district in Western Massachusetts. In the spring, the Program in Teaching hosted visits by Peter Dillon, Ed.D. and Sam Intrator, Ph.D. The program also held a roundtable discussion of the new National Core Curriculum.

Assistant Professor Amie Ashley Hane’s research examines social and emotional development from infancy through middle childhood and integrates multiple levels of analysis, including behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroendocrine methodologies. She conducted several studies in her laboratory this year in conjunction with students Julia Bender-Stern’13, Kaitlin Dinet’13, Chelsey Barrios’12, Cam Nguyen’12, Anna Szymanski’12, Ashley Turner’12, Erin Altenburger’11, Ian Murphy’11, Ellen Ramsey’11, and Sarah Weber’11. Professor Hane worked together with honors thesis student Ellen Ramsey on a study examining temperament and preschoolers’ physiological responses to the loss of social contingency.

Professor Hane submitted two grants to the NIH this year, which are currently under review. She has continued to work in conjunction with colleagues at the University of Maryland where she is a co-investigator of a longitudinal project examining continuity in temperament from infancy through childhood. She also continued to work collaboratively with colleagues from the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Columbia University on research examining maternal depression, mother-infant interaction, and infant self regulation. She is a co-investigator in an ongoing study at Columbia examining the effects of an intervention program for parents of infants admitted to a neonatal intensive care unit.

This year Professor Hane published original research in Developmental Psychology, Developmental Psychobiology, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, Journal of Family Psychology, and Social Development. Her research team presented peer-reviewed posters and papers at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development in Montreal. Professor Hane gave invited talks this year at the University of Toronto and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Professor Hane became an Associate Editor of the International Journal of Behavioral Development and served as an ad-hoc reviewer for several other journals, including Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Early Human Development, Emotion, Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Journal of Early Adolescence, and Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology.

During the fall term and a spring semester sabbatical at Duke University, Professor Laurie Heatherington and her students continued research on change processes in psychotherapy, including ongoing research on the therapeutic alliance in couple and family therapy (in collaboration with colleagues at SUNY Albany and Universidad de La Coruña, Spain), predictors of retention and outcome in group CBT treatment for anxiety disorders (in collaboration with psychologists at the Brien Center and Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, MA), and outcomes of residential treatment for major mental illness. They also studied the outcomes of a NAMI-directed training for Berkshire County police officers in handling cases involving emotionally disturbed persons. Her students pursued their own thesis and independent study research projects as well, on the role of social cognitive factors in interpersonal relationship difficulties, the predictors of stigma and other judgments of children with ADHD, and international psychology.

Professor Heatherington attended the 2010 International Society for Psychotherapy Research Conference in June in Asilomar, CA, where she presented a paper, “Corrective Experiences and Perceived Mechanisms of Change.” Also in June she was awarded the Distinguished Contribution to Family Systems Research Award at the American Family Therapy Association conference in Boulder, Colorado. She was elected President of the North American chapter of the Society for Psychotherapy Research, for a term 2011-2013. With colleagues, she published a meta-analysis and chapter on the alliance in couple and family therapy, in Psychotherapy Relationships that Work: Evidence-based Practice (2nd ed), and two journal articles. And with Williams colleague Marlene Sandstrom, she wrote a successful AALAC/Mellon 23 Collaborative Workshop Grant, “Clinical Psychology in the Liberal Arts College: Surviving and Thriving in the 21st Century.”

Professor Heatherington continued to serve on the editorial boards of Psychotherapy Research, Journal of Family Psychology, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, and Applications, was newly appointed to the editorial board of Journal of Counseling Psychology, and did ad-hoc reviewing for several other journals and publishers. She served on the Associates Board of the Gould Farm (Monterey, MA), a treatment center/working farm serving people with schizophrenia and other major mental illnesses and directs an ongoing twelve year program evaluation and outcomes study there.

Professor Saul Kassin is currently on leave while serving as a Distinguished Professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Focused on policy reform on matters concerning wrongful convictions, Kassin worked this past year with the American Psychological Association in writing several amicus briefs to state supreme courts. He also appeared before criminal justice task forces in New York and Pennsylvania. He has contributed chapters to three scholarly books and has presented talks at colleges, universities, law schools, conferences, and the Vera Institute of Justice. In 2011, he published the eighth edition of the textbook Social Psychology coauthored by Steven Fein and Hazel Markus. He has also written an op-ed article for CNN.com and has appeared on NBC Dateline, CBS 48 Hours, and a New York 1 story on the Central Park jogger case. This past year, Kassin served as Consulting Editor for Law and Human Behavior, Research Advisory Board of the Innocence Project, Advisory Board member of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), external faculty for the International Centre for Research in Forensic Psychology at the University of Portsmouth, and reviewer for the National Science Foundation. He has also served as a consultant in several cases.

Professor Kris Kirby published one paper during this past year, which reported the results of seven experiments on the curvature of utility functions, conducted under the auspices of a grant from the National Science Foundation. He also supervised the honors thesis of Tasha Chu’11, on the discounting of the utility of delayed rewards. Professor Kirby joined the editorial board of the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, and in addition to serving as a reviewer for NSF grant applications, he served as an ad hoc reviewer for Behavioral Research Methods, Journal of Decision Making, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Assistant Professor Nate Kornell continues to research the interaction between learning, memory, education, and self-monitoring. He published six journal articles and two book chapters in the past year. His research was featured in the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, NPR, Education Week, and other media outlets. He began blogging for Psychology Today and writing a column for Miller-McCune in an effort to disseminate research on cognition and learning more broadly.

Professor Marlene Sandstrom’s research focuses on socially vulnerable children. She is particularly interested in victimization, bullying, bystander behavior, and social influence.  This fall, she presented the Sigma Xi Lectures, titled They like me, they like me not: Peer relations in childhood. In the spring, Professor Sandstrom co-chaired a symposium at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, titled Bearing witness to bullying: How can bystanders be empowered to protect their victimized classmates. At this same meeting, Professor Sandstrom also presented papers on bystander behavior, and the association between self-esteem and aggression.  Over the past year, Professor Sandstrom published a chapter on peer influence for a book titled Popularity in the Peer System. In addition, she has served as an ad hoc reviewer for Developmental Psychology and Developmental Science.

Associate Professor Noah Sandstrom continues to explore the behavioral and neuroanatomical consequences of global ischemia and interventions that may influence these outcomes. He and Marijke DeVos’11 explored how the steroid hormone estradiol administered after an ischemic event influences neuronal survival. Working with Kylie Huckleberry’11, he examined how voluntary exercise impacts performance on learning and memory tasks following ischemic insults. In July, Sandstrom, Jennah Durham’10, and Katherine Jordan ’09 presented their work on neuroprotective effects of estradiol at the annual meeting of the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology (SBN) held in Toronto, Canada. Sandstrom has also served as a reviewer for several journals and as a member of the review panel for the Behavioral Neuroscience Fellowship study section at the National Institutes of Health.

Professor Kenneth Savitsky continued his research on egocentrism in everyday social judgment and published an article based on this work in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. He supervised the thesis research of Janna Gordon’11.

Professor Betty Zimmerberg continued her research on the epigenetics of anxiety behavior as well as starting her term as chair of the Psychology Department. Shivon Robinson’11 conducted her senior honors thesis on the epigenetic effects of communal nesting on object recognition memory in rats selectively bred for high and low rates of distress calls. Another senior thesis student, Fhatarah Zinnamon’11, started a new line of research in our lab on empathy and mirror neurons. Students in the lab helping on these projects were Amber Cardoos’12, Sierra Germeyan’13, Alexandra Berg’14 and Manasi Iyer’14. Traveling to the beautiful island of Sardinia to attend the annual meeting of the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society last June, Zimmerberg presented the results of her research on the anxiolytic effects of socially housing during pregnancy, led a workshop for new investigators on grant writing and served on the Program Committee for the meeting. Other professional activities included serving on the Editorial Board of Developmental Psychobiology as well as reviewing for several journals and for the National Science Foundation.

Psychology Department Colloquia

Amie A. Hane, Williams College

“Beyond Licking and Grooming: Maternal Regulation of Infant Stress in the Caregiving Context”

Sarah Nelson, Harvard Medical School

“Under the Influence: How Our Understanding of Addiction Influences Our Approach to One of the Country’s Leading Public Health Threats, DUI”

Marlene Sandstrom, Williams College

“They Like Me, They Like Me Not: Peer Relations in Childhood,” Sigma Xi Lectures

Daniel Schacter, Harvard University

“Constructive Memory: Remembering the Past to Imagining the Future”

Catherine Monk, Columbia University

“Development Begins before Birth: Psychological Functioning during Pregnancy & Infant Neurobehavioral Trajectories”

Heather Cameron, National Institutes of Health

“Maturation and Function of New Neurons in the Adult Hippocampus”

Jennifer Randall Crosby, Williams College

“Targets of Prejudice”

Off-Campus Colloquia

Phebe Cramer

“Longitudinal Personality Change: The Role of Defense Mechanisms and IQ”
Paper presented at the national meeting of the Society for Personality Assessment, Boston, MA

“TAT Defense Mechanisms with Diverse Samples and Methods”
Symposium at the national meeting of the Society for Personality Assessment, Boston, MA

Jennifer Randall Crosby

“Good Intentions and Unexpected Consequences: The Effects of Social Identity on Intergroup Interactions”
Emerging Scholars Symposium, Franklin & Marshall College

Amie Ashley Hane

“Beyond Licking and Grooming: Maternal Regulation of Infant Stress in the Caregiving Context”
Invited presentation for the colloquium series for the Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Invited presentation given at the Centre for Research in Parenting: Social and Biological Determinants of Parenting. University of Toronto

“The Moderating Role of Maternal Expressed Emotion on Behavioral Inhibition in the Emergence of Anxious Behaviors”
Paper presented in the symposium chaired by K. Buss entitled Moderators and Mediators of Fearful Temperament Trajectories at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Montreal, Quebec, Canada with W. Marquis & N. A. Fox

“Maternal Regulation of Infant Stress in the Context of Routine Caregiving Tasks”
Paper presented in the symposium chaired by J. Mesman entitled New Approaches to Parental Sensitivity and Its Outcomes at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Montreal, Quebec, Canada with L. E. Philbrook

“Maternal and Child Behavior and Child Physiology During Discussion of Ambiguous Situations”
Poster presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Montreal, Quebec, Canada with E. Barrios

“Will I Get a Turn?” Anticipation of Peer Exclusion and Cardiac Reactivity and Regulation in School-Age Children”
Poster presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Montreal, Quebec, Canada with M. J. Sandstrom & A. Hoff

Laurie Heatherington

“Corrective Experiences and Perceived Mechanisms of Change”
2010 International Society for Psychotherapy Research Conference in Asilomar, CA

Saul Kassin

Colloquia and Guest Lectures
New York State Justice Task Force
Vera Institute of Justice
Cornell University Psychology Department
Cornell University Law School
New York University
Fordham University
Pennsylvania State Advisory Committee to Study Wrongful Convictions
Albany Law School Symposium on Wrongful Convictions

“Why Innocent People Confess — and How Their Confessions Corrupt Judgments”
Keynote speech presented at the Meeting of the International Investigative Interviewing Research Group, Dundee, Scotland

“When Confessions Trump DNA: Relative Impacts of Self-Report and DNA Evidence on Juror Decisions”
Paper presented at the Meeting of the American Psychology-Law Society, Miami, FL with S. Appleby

“ ‘I Would Never Do That!’…And Then They Do: Exploring Predicted and Actual Behavior During Interrogation Situations”
Paper presented at the Meeting of the American Psychology-Law Society, Miami, FL with J. Schell, H. Merckelbach, & H. Hospers

“Perpetrator Memory: Better than the Eyewitness?”
Paper presented at the Meeting of the American Psychology-Law Society, Miami, FL with J. Perillo

“Juror Perceptions of Confessions: Effects of Perceived Coercion and Guilty Knowledge”
Paper presented at the Meeting of the American Psychology-Law Society, Miami, FL with C. Crocker

“Predicting Malintent Targets with Eye-Tracking”
Paper presented at the Meeting of the American Psychology-Law Society, Miami, FL with D. Wallace & M. Hartwig

“The Corruptive Power of Confessions”
Keynote speech at the European Association of Psychology and Law, Gothenburg, Sweden

Nate Kornell

“Interleaving as the Friend of Induction”
Poster presented at the 91st annual meeting of the Western Psychological Association, Los Angeles, CA with M. S. Birnbaum & R. A. Bjork

“Difficult Ruled-based Category Learning Benefits From Massed Practice ”
Poster presented at the Symposium of the Science of Learning in Medical Education, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA with M. Garcia & R. A. Bjork * Winner of Best Poster, Research Category

Marlene Sandstrom

“Bearing Witness to Bullying: How Can Bystanders be Empowered to Protect their Victimized Classmates?”
Co-chair of paper symposium at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Montreal with M. Bartini

“Changing Bystanders to Defenders: A Norms-based Approach
Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Montreal with M. Bartini

“The Fragile Bully: Defensive Self-Esteem and Aggression in Early Adolescence’
Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Montreal with J. Jordan

“Cross-contextual Consistency of Children’s Aggression: An APIM Analysis”
Poster presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Montreal with A. H. N. Cillessen

“Will I Get a Turn? Anticipation of Peer Exclusion and Cardiac Reactivity and Regulation in School-Age Children”
Poster presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Montreal with A. A. Hane and A. L. Hoff

Noah Sandstrom

“Estradiol Protects Against Hippocampal Damage and Impairments in Fear Conditioning Resulting from Transient Global Ischemia in Mice”
Annual Meeting of the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology, Toronto, Canada with K. A. Jordan and J. L. Durham

Betty Zimmerberg

“Epigenetic Influences on Affective and Social Behavior in Rats Selectively Bred for an Infantile Trait”
International Behavioral Neuroscience Society meeting, Sardinia, Italy

Postgraduate Plans of Psychology Majors