PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT NEWS

PSYCHOLOGY DEPARTMENT

The Psychology Department began this bicentennial year by sponsoring an interdisciplinary conference in honor of one of Williams' most distinguished graduates, G. Stanley Hall, 1867. Hall was a pre-eminent figure in the early history of psychology, serving as the founder of the first recognized psychology laboratory in this country and presiding as the first president of the American Psychological Association. To honor his many scholarly achievements, we were proud to invite 12 distinguished scientists to Williamstown last fall to present papers on the topic of emotion. The three day conference was an enormous success and the provocative papers will be published next year in a special memorial volume.

This year also marked the continued scientific accomplishments of our faculty and many of our talented senior majors. Our faculty sponsored 9 senior honors theses that were presented to the department on May 16. Each of the student authors received honors, and three were subsequently elected to student membership in Sigma Xi. In addition, a number of current and former majors presented papers, co-authored with our faculty, at professional meetings held in this country and abroad. The titles of these talks can be found in the descriptions of the faculty's research.

We were also very pleased by the continued student interest in our department. This year, as in the next, we will have approximately 120 junior and senior majors. Not surprisingly, this substantial increase in the number of majors was accompanied by a large number of total registrations in psychology. We are delighted, of course, to know that the pedagogy and intellectual interests of our faculty appeal to many Williams students.

As we noted last year, one happy consequence of our sustained growth is the opportunity to welcome new faculty members. In 1994-95, three people will join the department as assistant professors. They are Carmen Arroyo, Ph.D., Yale university, a specialist in the area of social psychology who spent part of this year as an instructor in the department; Eileen Donahue, Ph.D., University of California at Berkeley, a personality psychologist who is currently a visiting assistant professor at Wellesley College; and Anjali Thapar, Ph.D., Case Western Reserve, who specializes in the area of cognitive psychology. These three appointments were the result of intensive national searches that attracted a large number of qualified applicants, and we are very pleased that Drs. Arroyo, Donahue, and Thapar have chosen to join the department.

In addition to three new assistant professors, we are fortunate next year to have the capable services of three lecturers. Dr. Susan Engel will be here for the full year teaching courses in developmental psychology, while Dr. Wendy Penner will teach a fall course on organizational psychology. Both Drs. Engel and Penner have been with us in past years, and we are pleased to welcome them back. They will be joined by Christina Studebaker, a social psychologist, who recently completed her doctoral work at Northwestern University. Dr. Studebaker will teach courses in social psychology in both the fall and spring semesters.

This year we bid farewell to three people who have spent all or part of the last year with us. Dr. Ben Stephens, who was here for the full year as a visiting associate professor, returns to his home base of Clemson University. Likewise, Dr. David Quadagno returns to Florida State University after spending the spring term on sabbatical as a visiting professor. We will miss the lively presence and effective teaching of both of these veterans who have long ties to Williams. Also departing after one year is Dr. Carol Franz who will leave New England winters behind when she becomes a Research Associate at the Institute of Human Development, University of California at Berkeley. We wish her the best in her new duties as we remember fondly the energy and dedication she brought to the classroom.

Our greatest loss this year is also our most unexpected. After 26 years of excellence in teaching, scholarship, and administrative service, Professor Andrew Crider has decided to retire from the department, far too prematurely we hasten to add. Professor Crider's illustrious career has been marked by curricular innovations, sustained scholarship, and dedicated service to both the department and the college. We will miss his wisdom and leadership in the coming years even as we wish the best both to him and to Anne in their new life in Boston.

Last year we lost through retirement the services of Angie Giusti who served as department secretary for the past 26 years. As might be expected, we looked forward to the transition to a new secretary with some trepidation. The worry, as it turns out, was needless. Since July 1 of last year we have been in the capable hands of Mary Swift whose efficiency is exceeded only by her pleasant demeanor and helpful attitude. We are very grateful to Mary for all she has done for us during her first year in a difficult and busy job.

We had another year of informative outside colloquia. We are grateful to Assistant Professor Steve Fein who organized a provocative series of talks on stereotypes and discrimination that brought three interesting speakers to the department. Our 1960 scholars program, designed to encourage students to consider academic careers, was also very successful. The program brought eminent psychologists to campus to present colloquia on their research. Each colloquium was followed by a discussion and dinner with students. Our speakers and their topics are listed below.

Once again our majors made substantial contributions to the governance of the department. The Psychology Students Liaison Committee (PSLC) continued to play an important role in representing majors to the department and vice versa. The PSLC was particularly helpful in meeting with and attending job talks by a large number of candidates for faculty positions in the department. We thank the following PSLC members for their invaluable work this year: Allison Burkett, Amelia Cottrell, Jessica Cross, Leigh Frost, Laura Hemmeter, Paula Peters, Ammu Ramakrishnan, Lisa Uebelacker, and Chris Winters. We are also grateful to a number of our majors who served as teaching assistants in several of our larger courses. For example, several students each semester help Psychology 201 students master computer-based statistical programs in our department computer lab, and students assisted each term in Psychology 101.

The Department continued its close association with the Neuroscience Program, chaired by Professor Solomon. The Neuroscience Program continues to benefit from a generous grant of $1,050,000 from the Essel foundation that supports student and faculty research in the neurosciences. The primary purpose of this award is to involve students in state-of-the-art neuroscience research. During this past summer, 11 Williams students were selected as Essel fellows and spent the summer working in the four neuroscience laboratories on campus. They were involved in diverse projects ranging from the investigation of spinal cord regeneration in fish to testing anti-dementia drugs in Alzheimer's patients. The majority of these students will continue as either honors thesis or independent study students during the 1994-95 academic year. Additionally, two high school students were selected as Essel fellows. These students rotated among the neuroscience laboratories during their 6 week tenure. The Essel foundation grant in collaboration with two grants from the Hughes foundation continues to support the new neuroscience teaching laboratory. The primary contribution to the Essel grant this year was the funding of two full-time technicians, Bo-Yi Yang and Steve Cole, to assist in running the laboratory. The establishment of this laboratory, and the continued help of Bo- Yi Yang and Steve Cole, has allowed students in both the beginning and upper level courses to gain neuroscience laboratory experience that is not generally available to undergraduate students. It also continues to allow expanding numbers of students to participate in more advanced research programs. One of the goals of the Essel foundation was to bring distinguished scientists to campus for extended visits. This year, we were fortunate to be visited by Dr. Carol Barnes who conducted a series of seminars on the Neurobiology of Aging.

Professor Phebe Cramer continued her work in the area of defense mechanisms. In 1993, she published "Change in Defense Mechanisms Following Intensive Treatment, as Related to Personality Organization and Gender", co-authored with Sidney Blatt of Yale University, in The Concept of Defense Mechanisms in Contemporary Psychology. In 1994, she published "Defense Mechanisms" in the Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, and contributed to Therapeutic Change: An Object Relations perspective, authored by S. J. Blatt and R. Q. Ford. She recently began a collaborative research study with Professor Jack Block of the University of California at Berkeley. In May of 1994, Professor Cramer presented a seminar to the clinical staff at the Austen Riggs Center on the use of the Thematic Apperception Test to assess change in Psychotherapy. She also served on the Center's Institutional Review Board for the use of human subjects in research. She attended the annual meeting of Rapaport-Klein Study Group at the Austen Riggs Center and the Nag's Head Conference on Personality & Social Psychology as an invited participant in Highland Beach, Florida, both in June of 1994. In addition, Professor Cramer was appointed to her second term as Associate Editor for the Journal of Psychology, and continued to serve on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Personality Assessment as well as serving as a reviewer for articles submitted to other professional journals. In May of 1994, she presented a talk entitled "Ways of Not Knowing the Self" to the science faculty at the Bronfman Faculty lunch series.

Assistant Professor Steven Fein conducted research on stereotypes and social cognition, attributional processes, suspicion, and influences of the media on attitudes. He supervised four senior honors theses, more than a half dozen Independent Study projects, and four Winter Study projects. In conjunction with his honors and independent study students, Professor Fein carried out a number of different studies on issues such as intergroup stereotypes and prejudice, homophobia, political psychology, suspicion and attributional processes, psychology and law, cross-cultural issues in social cognition, sports psychology, and self-esteem maintenance processes. In June, 1993, he presented a paper at the American Psychological Society conference in Chicago, entitled, "Downward Social Comparison as Self-Image Maintenance." In August, 1993, Dr. Fein presented 5 papers at the American Psychological Association conference in Toronto. These papers included: "Self-Esteem and Stereotype-Based Downward Social Comparison"; "Social Influence and the Presidential Debates," with Dr. George Goethals, Dr. Saul Kassin, and Jessica Cross '94; "Public vs. Private Judgments of Sexual Harassment," with Leigh Frost '94, Kate Nicholson '93, and Cheryl Stanton '94; "Thinking About Motives: Effects on Processing of Attribution-Relevant Information" and "Explicit and Implicit Memory for Unwanted Information," with Thomas Tomlinson '93. Papers co-authored by Dr. Fein were also presented at the April, 1994 Eastern Psychological Association conference in Providence, Rhode Island ("The Effects of Self-Image Threat on Stereotyping") and the May 1994 Midwestern Psychological Association conference in Chicago ("The Role of Encoding Processes in Motivated Evaluations"). Papers co-authored by Dr. Fein were published in the edited book, Psychology is Social ("Temper and Temperature on the Diamond: The Heat-Aggression Relationship in Major-League Baseball"). In October, 1993, Dr. Fein delivered a talk at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. At Williams, Dr. Fein delivered a talk entitled, "White Men Can't Jump, and Other Stereotypes", for the Bronfman Summer Science program, as well as a lecture on stereotypes and prejudice for the Williams Ethnic Workshop Winter Study program. In the summer of 1993, Dr. Fein created a manual for using computer programs to analyze research data, which has been used extensively by students working on senior theses, independent study projects, and empirical projects for classes. Along with colleagues, Dr. Robert Kavanaugh and Dr. Betty Zimmerberg Glick, Dr. Fein was a coordinator of the G. Stanley Hall Symposium on Emotion, held at Williams in October, 1993. In conjunction with his course, "Stereotypes, Prejudice, and Discrimination" (PSYC 341), Dr. Fein arranged for a number of talks by social psychologists. The speakers and their topics are listed below. He has also reviewed manuscripts for several psychology journals, including Psychological Bulletin, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Social Cognition.

George R. Goethals spent most of his time in the Provost's office, completing his fourth year in that position. He taught a section of PSYC 401 in the fall semester, and contributed to collaborative work on image making in presidential debates with Steve Fein and Saul Kassin, and on self-esteem with John Darley of Princeton University. In November, Goethals gave an alumni talk on image making in Milwaukee. His article in Academic Press's Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, entitled "Actor-Observer Differences in Attribution," was published this spring.

Assistant Professor Betty Zimmerberg Glick continued her research on the effects of prenatal alcohol exposure on the development of thermoregulation, funded by a grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA). She also was awarded a Small Instrumentation Grant from the NIAAA. In addition, Professor Zimmerberg Glick wrote a successful proposal to the National Institute of Mental Health for partial funding of the G. Stanley Hall Symposium on Emotion in October, 1993. In June, 1993, she was an invited speaker at a symposium entitled "Alcohol Effects on the HPA Axis: Molecular, Hormonal and Neural Correlates" at the annual meeting of the Research Society on Alcoholism in San Antonio, TX. In November, 1993, she attended the annual meeting of the International Society on Developmental Psychobiology in Arlington, VA, and presented research, with others, at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Washington, D In May, 1994, she attended the annual meeting of the International Behavioral Neuroscience Society in Clearwater, FL, where she presented research conducted with Peggy Drucker '94 and Jackie Weider '92 entitled "Behavioral Effects of the Neuroactive Steroid Allopregnanolone in Neonatal Rat Pups". Professor Zimmerberg Glick continued her reviewing of journal articles for Alcohol, Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, Neurotoxicology and Teratology, Physiology & Behavior, and Brain Research.

Associate Professor Laurie Heatherington and her students continued research on the process of change in psychotherapy. With Abbe Marrs, '93, she presented a paper "Constructivism, Constructions, and Change in Family Therapy," at the annual conference of the American Psychological Association in Toronto, Canada, in August 1993. She presented, along with colleagues from SUNY-Albany, "What We Do and Don't Know About the Process of Effective Family Therapy" at the annual conference of the Society for Psychotherapy Research, Pittsburgh, PA in June 1993. In October 1993, she presented "Relational Communication in Psychotherapy: Nine Years of Research" as an invited panelist for a forum honoring communication researcher Dr. Edna Rogers (Speech Communication Association Conference, Miami, Florida). Professor Heatherington served as Consulting Editor for Psychotherapy, the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, and the Journal of Family Psychology, and did ad-hoc reviewing for Sex Roles, the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, and the Journal of Counseling Psychology. Locally, she gave a Bronfman Science Center brown bag talk, "Gender and Self-Presentation: Round II," and a talk on "Schizophrenia and the Family" at the Gould Farm Center, Monterey MA.

Professor Saul Kassin continues to serve as a consulting editor for two journals, Law and Human Behavior and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He has also reviewed grant proposals for the Law and Social Science Foundation and serves as a trial consultant. Professor Kassin presented two papers to the American Psychology-Law Society in 1994. One entitled, "Coerced Confessions: Compliance, Internalization, and Confabulation," and the second, with H. Sukel, entitled "Coerced Confessions and the Jury: An Experimental Test of the Harmless Error Rule."

Professor Robert D. Kavanaugh completed his third year as department chair. Along with his colleague from the University of Oxford, Paul L. Harris, Professor Kavanaugh was awarded a collaborative research grant from NATO for his research on pretense comprehension in normal and autistic children. Together with Dara Eizenman, '93 and Paul L. Harris, he presented a paper entitled, "Two-Year-Olds' Understanding of Pretense Expressions of Independent Agency" at the International Conference on Infant Studies in Paris. Along with his psychology department colleagues Betty Zimmerberg Glick and Steve Fein, Professor Kavanaugh organized the G. Stanley Hall conference on emotion as the department's contribution to the Williams Bicentennial. He also continued his role as ad hoc reviewer by evaluating manuscripts for Child Development, Developmental Psychology, and the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

First-year Assistant Professor Kris Kirby began his Williams career by conducting research with several students on content effects in conditional reasoning problems, the effects of causal constraints on categorical reasoning, the belief-bias effect in syllogistic reasoning, suboptimally distributed choices, the relation between spontaneous negative framing and depression, the effects of sample-size in probability estimation tasks, and on discounting models of impulsiveness. In November 1993 Professor Kirby attended the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Washington, DC. He also served as an ad hoc reviewer for the journal Cognition. In addition, he authored a book published in July 1993, Advanced Data Analysis with SYSTAT, Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Wendy Penner, Research Associate in the department, co-authored with J. E. Dutton "The Importance of Organizational Identity for Strategic Agenda Building", in Strategic Thinking, Leadership and the Management of Change.

Professor Paul Solomon continued to serve as chair of the Neuroscience program. He also continued to serve as a principal investigator on a number of research grants including a $600,000 grant from the National Institute on Aging which funds the Memory Disorders Treatment and Diagnostic Center at Southwestern Vermont Medical Center where he serves as Co-Director. This grant was renewed for an additional 5 years in April. Dr. Solomon also continued work on three ongoing projects that were renewed. Two were funded by Miles Laboratories. The first involves the study of the anti-dementia compound nimodipine on synaptic plasticity in rabbits and the second is a study of the effects of nimodipine on cognitive functioning in Alzheimer's patients. The third renewed grant was from Parke-Davis Pharmaceutical Research to study the anti-dementia compound CI-979 on Alzheimer's patients. He also received one new grant this year from Pfizer Research ($310,000) to study the anti-dementia compound CP-118,954 in Alzheimer's patients. Dr. Solomon also continued to supervise the development of the neuroscience teaching laboratory with the benefit of a second grant from the Hughes foundation that provided behavioral and electrophysiological equipment. He continued to direct the Essel Foundation grant to the Neuroscience program which funded a summer research program involving 10 Williams students as well as a trip for students and faculty to the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington where 7 students from his laboratory presented papers. These include, "A Double Blind Placebo Controlled Study of Over-The-Counter 'Memory Enhancing' Agents: Clinical Trials Conducted by Undergraduate Students" with Aliina Hirschoff '94, Bridget Kelly '95, and Mahri Relin '95; "Nimodipine Facilitates Retention of the Classically Conditioned Eyeblink Response in Rabbits," with Mica Wood '93, Catherine Oyler '93, Marie Tomasi, '93, Bo-Yi Yang and Mary Ellen Groccia-Ellison, Research Assistants, and R. J. Fanelli of the Institute for Dementia Research, Miles Inc.; and "Synergistic Facilitation of Hippocampal Synaptic Activation with High Frequency Stimulation and Classical Eyeblink Conditioning in Rabbits," with Maureen Kwak '93, and Bo-Yi Yang and Mary Ellen Groccia-Ellison, Research Assistants. Dr. Solomon also presented a paper at the 1993 Society for Neuroscience Meeting with colleagues, W. W. Pendlebury, C. S. Davis, S. I. Gracon, M. J. Knapp, and D. S. Knopman, entitled, "Improved Cognitive Abilities in Alzheimer's Patients Receiving a High Dose of Tacrine" as well as papers at a number of meetings including the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory meeting in Park City, Utah, and the Third International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease in Chicago. He also attended investigators meeting for Pfizer Pharmaceuticals in San Diego and the West Coast Neuropsychology Meeting in San Diego as well as the American Academy of Neurology meetings in Washington. During this past year Dr. Solomon and several colleagues published an article on tacrine for the treatment of Alzheimer's Disease in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The data presented in this article formed the basis of the United States Food and Drug Administration's approval of tacrine (Cognex) as the first medication for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. Based on this work, Dr. Solomon gave more than 100 invited colloquia at medical centers, universities, and hospitals. He also served as National Spokesman for tacrine and in this capacity appeared on more than 75 television and radio news programs including NBC and CBS nightly news, CNN news, the CBS morning show, and Larry King radio. He also did interviews for numerous newspapers and magazines. This year, Dr. Solomon completed his term on the Board of Directors of Northern Berkshire Mental Health Association. He continues to serve on the Board of the Western Massachusetts Alzheimer's Association and the Conte Institute. He was reappointed to the medical staff at Southwestern Medical Center. He was listed this year in Who's Who in the East, Who's Who in the World, Who's Who in American Education, and Who's Who in Frontier Science and Technology.

>PSYCHOLOGY COLLOQUIA

1960's Scholars Program

Daniel L. Schacter
Harvard University
"Implicit Memory: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective"

Robert Cialdini
Arizona State University
"Basking in Reflected Glory: Self-Presentation Through Raw Association"

Sarah Leibowitz
Rockefeller University
"Can Appetite for Fat, Body Weight Gain, and Eating Disorders be Understood Through a
Molecule in the Brain"

Morris Eagle
Austen Riggs Psychiatric Center
"Repressive Coping Style: Adaptive and Maladaptive Aspects"
Bernhard Visiting Fellows

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
Haverford College
"Psychoanalysis and Adolescence"

Patricia Goldman-Rakic
Yale University School of Medicine
"Opening the Mind Through Neural Biology"

Stereotypes, Prejudice and Discrimination Series

Peter Glick
Lawrence University
"The Two Faces of Adam: Hostile and Benevolent Sexism"

William von Hippel
Ohio State University
"On the Role of Encoding Processes in Stereotype Maintenance"

Steven Spencer
SUNY, Albany
"The Effects of Stereotype Vulnerability on the Academic Performance of Women and African
Americans."

Other Colloquia

Lawrence Fitzgerald, Ph.D.
Yale University
"Regulation of NMDA and Non-NMDA Glutamate Receptors by Dopamine Antagonists"

Matt Zaitchik, Ph.D.
"Forensic Psychology"

Nurit Berman, MSW, LICSW
"The Current Status of Social Work as a Profession."

Ray Burke, MA, Area Director of the Mass. Dept. of Social Services
"History and Current Challenges in Child Protective Services"

Post-Graduate Plans of Psychology Majors

Peter D Ackerman: Working in Boston for a medical group as a patient services director

Kristen J Anderson

Jennifer L Axelrod: Ph.D., school psychology

Talia M Bahr: Masters in Social Work, University of Alabama

Syam Buradagunta

Allison B Burkett: Year off in San Francisco, then graduate school in clinical psychology

Christopher Cardarelli

Jessica A Cross

Elizabeth L Culpepper

Shannon R Curtis: Working as research assistant in area of A.D.H.D. and other disorders, Mass. General Hospital, Boston, for two years, then graduate school

Kerry S Davenport

Peggy C Drucker: Plans to attend medical school in future

Todd B Ducharme

Amy E Eckhardt

Stephen B Edmonds Jr

Dominic H Ellis: Will be working until finalizing plans for grad school

Kelly M Faucher

Lisa B Friedlander

Leigh A Frost: Ph.D. in social psychology, Northwestern University

Anthony J Gagliano

Nicholas J Gemelli

Julia M Gemma: Ph.D. in clinical psychology; Case Western Reserve University

Santi T Goetzinger

Megan E Hay

Aliina M Hirschoff: Master of Fine Arts in creative writing, American University

Brinsley E Horner

Jennifer H J Kim

Christopher G Kinabrew

Kari I Larsen

Josh Y Levy

Vikas Lunia

Genevieve R Mann

Upacala T Mapatuna

Nino N Marakovic: Financial analyst at Morgan Stanley (2-year position), followed by Stanford Business School

Allison L McCloskey: Working for First Chicago Bank in First Scholar Program which includes attending Northwestern University's School of Business Management

Brenna C McDonald: Working at Williams as lab technician for Prof. Zimmerberg Glick

Cathleen A Miller

Lisa N Monachino

Tanya N Nicholson

John A Patti

Jessica A Perrotti: Summer at Wediko Children's Services in Hillsboro, NH, as direct-care staff member w/severely emotionally disturbed adolescent boys. Then, to Boston for a year, then to grad school in clinical psychology.

David J Rosenfeld: Working in child care at Walker Home and School in Needham, MA, an all boys' school for emotionally disturbed children

Sandra J Ryan: Summer internship in publishing with Beacon Press, Boston

Amy E Saltonstall

Matthew E Schenck

Colin M Sellar

Micah A Singer

Emily E Sprong

Cheryl M Stanton: Law School, University of Chicago

John R Tam: University of Pennsylvania, School of Medicine

Kimberly A Thomas

Lisa A Uebelacker: Research assistant at Mass. General in psychopharmacology with future plans for graduate school in clinical psychology

Nicole E Vennell

Jennifer L Whitfield: Year in Italy, then graduate school in psychology or education with future plans in teaching

Judith M Williamson

Susan D Wood

Akiko Yokoyama


Modified by: bbabcock
Modification Date: Wednesday, March 8, 1995