PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT

The Psychology Department had another busy and successful year in 2002-03. We had more majors, about 80 seniors and nearly 90 juniors, than any department in the College, and we struggled with large classes. Nevertheless, we managed to hold our sections in Experimentation and Statistics and the senior seminar to manageable numbers. Our faculty worked hard to maintain the quality of instruction despite the large numbers, and we received invaluable help from C.J. Gillig, Psychology Technical Assistant, and Beth Stachelek, our Department Administrative Assistant. Faculty and staff alike kept most everything running smoothly.

We were joined by two new faculty members this year. One of them, Noah Sandstrom, is not really new. Noah had been a Lecturer in neuroscience courses for three years but joined the department on a regular appointment as Assistant Professor of Psychology starting in fall 2002. In addition, Safa Zaki, our new cognitive psychology faculty member, joined the staff in the fall. Francine Rosselli, Class of 1988, taught in the fall semester as Visiting Assistant Professor. We were fortunate to have all three join us this past year.

Marlene Sandstrom was on leave at the Oakley Center for the academic year, and Ari Solomon was on leave in the fall, but back teaching in the spring. Next year Ari will have an Assistant Professor leave for the full year. Phebe Cramer will have a Mellon-supported “renewal leave” for the spring semester next year to continue her new line of research on personality. She will spend the semester at UC Berkeley. Al Goethals will be on sabbatical for the year, spending the fall at Amherst College and the spring at the University of Richmond.

Next year we will be joined by three visitors. Bill Goodman, a local clinical psychologist, will teach a course on psychological testing and assessment, a course he taught here successfully two years ago. Joe Greer, a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from UMass will be visiting for the full year, and Lauren Shapiro, a Stanford Ph.D., will be starting a two-year visiting appointment in developmental psychology.

Laurie Heatherington begins a stint as department chair on July 1, 2003. We wish her well.

Professor Phebe Cramer attended the 11th European Conference on Personality, held in Jena, Germany, in July 2002. At this conference, she presented a keynote address: “The Development of Defense Mechanisms with Implications for Personality Functioning.” In addition, she presented a workshop titled “Using Narrative Material to Assess Defense Mechanisms.”

Professor Cramer continued as a member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Personality Assessment and the European Journal of Personality, and was appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Research in Personality.

She served as an ad hoc reviewer for the Journal of Adolescence, Journal of Personality, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Assessment, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, International Journal of Psychology, International Journal of Testing, American Psychologist, and Psychological Methods.

Professor Cramer is continuing research on defense mechanisms, newly focusing on how defense use predicts change in personality across the adult years. This work is being carried out in collaboration with the Institute of Human Development, University of California, Berkeley. Her research on gender differences in defense use was reviewed in the Clinician’s Research Digest under the title “Do Men and Women Use Defense Mechanisms Differently?”

Lecturer Susan Engel wrote a chapter on children’s narrative development for a book on narratives and early education edited by Bert Van Oers from the Netherlands. She wrote a paper on Educational Leadership for the Encyclopedia of Leadership (Al Goethals, Editor) to be published in 2004. She presented research on children’s curiosity at the Society for Research in Child Development, Tampa, Florida in April, based on work done with Hilary Hackmann ’02. Luke Hyde ’03 and Professor Engel conducted a study in which they looked at how young children come to know about the life stories of other people. She delivered a paper at the annual meeting of the Piaget Society in June.

In her capacity as director of the Program in Teaching, Professor Engel hosted a lecture, given in October, by Thomas Friedman. At Williams, Professor Engel served on the Committee on Undergraduate Life. She continued to serve as educational advisor to the Hayground School, in Bridgehampton NY, and served on the search committee to hire a superintendent for the Southern Berkshire Regional School District. She also reviewed research for Merrill Palmer Quarterly.

Professor Steven Fein conducted research on stereotypes and prejudice; social influence factors in perceptions of humor, sex roles, and racially sensitive attitudes; the roles of physiological and social psychological factors in women’s and men’s math performance; and strategies to enable individuals to perform athletic tasks well under pressure. Professor Fein co-authored Motivated Social Perception: The Ontario Symposium. He also co-authored the chapter, “Self-image Maintenance Goals and Sociocultural Norms in Motivated Social Perception.” With department colleague Saul Kassin, he also published, Readings in Social Psychology: The Art and Science of Research. With department colleagues Al Goethals and Marlene Sandstrom, Professor Fein is completing the editing of Gender and Aggression: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. With Dr. William von Hippel, of the University of New South Wales, Professor Fein wrote two chapters for the Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, “Stereotypes” and “Prejudice.” Professor Fein also co-authored the chapter, “Responses of Threat versus Challenge Mediated Arousal to Stereotypes Alleging Intellectual Inferiority” for the book, Gender Differences in Mathematics.

In addition to invited colloquia around the country, Professor Fein presented a paper at the Social Cognition Conference, held as part of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology annual meeting, in February 2003 in Los Angeles. . He also co-authored the paper, The role of motivation in the unconscious: How our motives control the activation of thoughts and shape our actions, presented at the 6th Sydney Symposium of Social Psychology, in Sydney, Australia, in March.

With Dr. Talia Ben-Zeev of San Francisco State University, Professor Fein received a quarter-million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation for their research, entitled, “Cognitive and physiological effects of stereotypes on problem solving.”

Professor Fein served as a consulting editor at the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and for Psychological Science. Professor Fein served on the Executive Committee of the International Society for Self and Identity. Professor Fein supervised the work of numerous independent study projects, Winter Study independent study projects, and several research assistants. He also helped continue to coordinate and teach in the Summer Humanities and Social Science program at Williams.

Assistant Professor Elliot Friedman and his students worked with several different animal models of clinical depression this past year, examining a variety of behavioral, hormonal, and immunological responses. Summer students Elizabeth Campos ’03 and Elena Simon ’03 conducted projects focused on immune responses and hormone profiles in the Flinders Sensitive Line (FSL) and Wistar-Kyoto genetic rat models of depression while Jacqueline Dinzey ’03 measured cardiovascular function in the FSL rats. Professor Friedman presented the results of Jackie’s work, along with data gathered by previous students Sarah Oboyski ’03 and Margaret Burr ’02, at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Orlando, FL in November.

Professor Friedman also sponsored two senior honors thesis students in Psychology this past year: Jackie Dinzey and Marissa Berman ’03. Jackie examined behavior and immune function in FSL and control rats that were chronically treated with desipramine, a tricyclic antidepressant. Her work was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Illness. Marissa tested the hypothesis that behavioral and immunological abnormalities in the FSL depression model could be changed through early experience. She cross-fostered FSL rat pups onto dams of the Flinders Resistant Line (FRL) control rat strain and vice versa. When the pups became adults, Marissa examined behavior in the forced swim test, a gold standard measure of depressive behavior in rats. Her data show a clear interaction between genetic and environmental influences in these animals and give some insight into specific aspects of maternal care that may influence depressive behavior in adult animals. Professor Friedman and Marissa plan to prepare these data for publication and to present them at the annual meeting of the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology in New Orleans in November 2003.

Finally, students in Professor Friedman’s Psychoneuroimmunology course last fall examined immune function in an experimental animal model of depression: Chronic Mild Stress. The project was extremely labor intensive, and the data were sufficiently compelling that most of the class elected to continue their work in the form of a group project in the spring. They expanded the project and generated very intriguing data. Students in his Health Psychology survey course this past spring conducted semester-long research projects on topics ranging from trichotillomania (compulsive hair pulling) to the relationship between sleep and health, which culminated in the production of some impressive web pages. See <http://www.williams.edu/williams-only/Psychology/psych262/years.html#2002>.

Professor George R. Goethals finished a five-year term as department chair, relieved for one year by Bob Kavanaugh, and is looking forward to a sabbatical. He also completed a five-year term as founding chair of the Program in Leadership Studies. He was gratified that the Williams College faculty approved a new Leadership Studies concentration in April. Professor Goethals completed a chapter on “Presidential Leadership” for the Annual Review of Psychology and co-authored a paper supported by the Mellon Foundation on student perceptions of faculty caring using data from three cohorts of alumni at more than 30 colleges. He attended the International Leadership Association Conference in Seattle in November, and participated in a panel on formulating a general theory of leadership. Professor Goethals took a group of ten students to Panama for Winter Study, co-teaching the course with Political Science Professor Emeritus Fred Greene. He served on the Advisory Committee for Shareholder Responsibility and as Faculty Associate of Gladden House.

Professor Laurie Heatherington returned from sabbatical leave in spring 2002 and continued her research on marital interaction, family therapy and the role of attributions in family relationships. She served as the Mellon Undergraduate Research advisor and thesis advisor for one student, and supervised four others in extra-curricular research on a longitudinal study of the correlates and consequences of attributions that parents make about their teen’s behaviors.

In October, she presented “Process-outcome Research in Family Therapy” as an invited member of a special research panel, “Research to Practice and Practice to Research in Family Therapy” at the American Association of Marital and Family Therapy, Cincinnati, Ohio and in May 2003 attended the Second Penn State University Conference on the Process of Change in Psychotherapy, which brought together 16 researchers from across the US and Canada for a two-day forum. She published a chapter “From Dyads to Triads and Beyond: Relational Control in Individual and Family Therapy” in a book by V. Escudero Carranza and E.L. Rogers, Relational Communication (Erlbaum, 2003). She also published an article, which was based on the thesis research of Steve Gray ‘00 in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology and a book review of Handbook of Psychological Change in Psychiatric Services with Steve Eyre ’03.

Professor Heatherington was appointed or re-appointed for three-year terms on the editorial boards of Psychotherapy Research, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, and Journal of Family Psychology. She served on the Board of Directors of the Gould Farm (Monterey, MA), a treatment center/working farm that serves people with major mental illness, and continued her volunteer consulting with them on an ongoing outcomes assessment study.

Professor Saul Kassin completed his first year as Chair of the new Legal Studies Program. This past year, he was nominated and elected to Fellow Status in both the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society and received funding from the MacArthur Foundation for research on juvenile justice. He co-authored two papers in Law and Human Behavior and published “Eyewitness Researchers as Experts in Court: Responsive to Change in a Dynamic and Rational Process” in American Psychologist. He contributed an op-ed column in the New York Times on “False confessions and the jogger case.” Kassin gave a number of invited talks, which are listed under psychology off-campus colloquia. He also gave research talks at the University of Virginia, Claremont McKenna College, the University of Arkansas, and Florida International University. He spoke to Williams College Alumni Associations in Washington, DC, Portland, Maine, and Vero Beach, Florida. Kassin continued to serve as a consulting editor for Law and Human Behavior, reviewer for the National Science Foundation, and consultant and expert witness in a number of cases--including some involving DNA exonerations. This past year, his work with Williams students was featured in an APS Observer article, “Undergraduate Research a Priority at NSF.” His work was also cited in several major newspapers, including the New York Times and Daily News, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Miami Herald, and Newsweek. He appeared on Court TV’s Both Sides, with Rikki Klieman; PBS The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, National Public Radio, Talk of the Nation and Morning Edition, ABC Prime Time Live and Nightline; and MSNBC, Nachman.

Professor Robert D. Kavanaugh completed his third year as Director of the Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences where he was involved in organizing several interdisciplinary lecture series, and overseeing the Center’s colloquia, seminars, and weekly research lunches. In the Psychology Department, Dr. Kavanaugh continued his research on the development of imagination and causal reasoning in young children. In April, Dr. Kavanaugh presented a paper with Jessica Grogan ’02 at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Tampa. In June, Dr. Kavanaugh presented a paper with Joseph Lucia ’03 as part of an invited symposium on “Pretend Play and the Symbolic Mind” at the meetings of the Jean Piaget Society, Chicago. During the past year, Dr. Kavanaugh also served as an ad hoc reviewer for the journals Child Development and Cognitive Development.

Associate Professor Kris Kirby completed his final year of research funded by a $500,000 FIRST award from the National Institute of Mental Health. This research yielded three new publications in peer-reviewed journals this year, including a paper co-authored by Mariana Santiesteban ’97. Professor Kirby also supervised a senior honors thesis project by Daniel Klasik ’03. In addition to serving as a reviewer for the National Science Foundation, Professor Kirby served as an ad hoc reviewer for several journals, including Behavioural Processes, Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology, Journal of Economic Psychology, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, Management Science, Psychological Bulletin, and Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

Professor Kirby served as the first chair of the new Cognitive Science Program at Williams. This interdisciplinary program was developed by Kirby, Andrea Danyluk (Associate Professor Computer Science) and Joseph Cruz ’91 (Assistant Professor of Philosophy), with an advisory board that included Heather Williams (Professor of Biology), Steve Gerrard (Professor of Philosophy), and Safa Zaki (Assistant Professor of Psychology). In the spring, Professor Kirby co-taught the new introductory course for the concentration, Minds, Brains, and Intelligent Behavior (COGS 222), with Professor Cruz, and also co-supervised the senior research project of the program’s first concentrator, Jennifer Misyak ’03. Information about the concentration can be found in the Course Catalog.

Assistant Professor Marlene Sandstrom’s research this past year has continued to focus on children’s peer relationships. She is particularly interested in issues of competence and resiliency – that is, how children negotiate difficult peer experiences (teasing, exclusion, victimization) over time. Dr. Sandstrom has continued an ongoing collaboration with the elementary schools in Pittsfield and North Adams, and has been collecting classroom data with the help of several undergraduate students. Over the past year, Dr. Sandstrom has had manuscripts accepted to the Journal of Personality, Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, and Social Development. Dr. Sandstrom is an active member of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Research in Child Development. She recently presented her work at the biannual meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development in Tampa, as well as the Conference on Building Pathways to Success: Research, Policy, and Practice on Development in Middle Childhood, in Washington, DC.

Assistant Professor Noah Sandstrom conducted research examining hormonal modulation of cognitive processes including attention and memory. Along with thesis students Jessie O’Brien and Christina Adams, he has been examining the extent to which estrogens may be neuroprotective. Using a variety of surgical, behavioral, and histological techniques, they have shown that estrogens can minimize the damage that results from transient global ischemia.

Dr. Sandstrom attended a number of conferences including the annual meeting of the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology where he presented a paper with Sarah Hart (Williams, ’02). He also took students from his Hormones and Behavior course to a Behavioral Neuroendocrinology symposium at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In the past year, Dr. Sandstrom has served as an ad hoc reviewer for Behavioral Neuroscience and Behavioral Brain Research and published a paper in Brain Research.

Professor Kenneth Savitsky continued his research on egocentrism and social judgment, co-authoring papers in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Law and Human Behavior. Dr. Savitsky and his colleagues made presentations of their research at the annual meeting of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, in Los Angeles, CA. In addition, he presented an invited colloquium at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

As part of an intramural research team, Assistant Professor Ari Solomon is using longitudinal data sets to explore the boundaries between clinical depression and normal negative moods. He continues to study cognitive and interpersonal markers of depression-proneness, and began serving on the editorial board of the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Assistant Professor Safa Zaki continued her research on mathematical models of categorization and memory in her new lab at Williams. In the past year, with her collaborators, she published papers in the Journal of International Neuropsychological Psychology, the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, and in Memory and Cognition. In addition, two papers that she has co-authored have been accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Dr. Zaki, along with a number of co-investigators, received funding for “A Collaborative Consortium in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Category Learning” from the J. S. McDonnell Foundation. The award of $310,000 over a 3-year period serves to fund collaborative research involving several labs in an attempt to further our understanding of the neural basis of categorization.

Dr. Zaki has served as an ad-hoc reviewer for several journals including the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition; Psychonomic Bulletin and Review; and Memory and Cognition.

Dr. Zaki, along with her colleagues, presented their work at the Psychonomic Society, the Society for Mathematical Psychology, and the First Annual Cognitive Neuroscience of Category Learning Conference. Dr. Zaki also gave an invited colloquium at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Professor Betty Zimmerberg continued her research on the neural mechanisms underlying behavioral responses to fearful situations and how experiences of early deprivation, like child neglect, might impair developing coping behavior. The research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, entitled “Early Experience and Neurosteroid Response to Stress.” During the summer, Melody Samuels ’02, Abigail Davidson ’03 and Shakierah Fuller ’03 all worked on a new project using a novel animal model of anxiety - rats bred for high and low rates of vocalization after brief maternal separation. Last summer, Abigail Davidson ‘03 and Abigail Rosenthal ’02 joined Zimmerberg in Capri, Italy, to present their research at the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society. In November, Zimmerberg presented research conducted on her leave at the University of Cagliari, Italy, at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Orlando, Florida. In the spring, Ju Kim ’04 joined Zimmerberg in New York to give an invited presentation of their research at the New York Academy of Sciences meeting.”

As chair of the Neuroscience Program, she directed the Essel Foundation summer program, which had 13 students working enthusiastically in neuroscience faculty labs in the Psychology and Biology Departments. Zimmerberg also began distribution of a CD of animations for teaching introductory neuroscience entitled “Synaptic Transmission.” To visit the website linked to this CD, the Multimedia Neuroscience Education Project please go to <http://www.williams.edu/imput>.

In the fall, Zimmerberg was elected a Fellow in the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience Society and asked to serve on the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Science Advisory Committee. Other professional activities included serving on the editorial board of Developmental Psychobiology, on the steering committee of N.E.U.R.O.N and as the chair of the membership committee of the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society. She was an external reviewer for Princeton University, the University of Richmond, and the University of South Carolina School of Medicine. Zimmerberg was also was a grant reviewer for the Behavioral Neuroscience Program at the National Science Foundation and the CUNY Internal Research Award Program, and reviewed manuscripts for European Journal of Neuroscience, Behavioral Brain Research, Developmental Psychobiology, Physiology and Behavior, and Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research.