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Josh Eng, a graduate student in the Social/Personality Program, has been awarded a prestigious UC Berkeley Dissertation Year Fellowship for 2011-12. Josh is one of only 12 award winners for the entire campus. His dissertation, supervised by Professor Oliver John, focuses on how individuals and cultures differ in the way they regulate emotions and how their emotion regulation influences social behavior and performance in achievement situations. He has also provided extensive service to our department, including a recent stint as student representative on the New Faculty Search Committee (in Personality/Individual Differences).
Jane Hu, Jennifer Kanady, Alice Moon, and Michelle Rheinschmidt, four Ph.D. students in the first year of our graduate program, have been awarded the
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. This award is one of the most prestigious graduate student fellowships in the U.S. so we are proud to acknowledge their accomplishments. Further information about their proposed research is outlined below:
Jane Hu
(Change, Plasticity, and Development student advised by
Fei Xu)
Jane's research is on Bayesian Inference in Infant Word Learning. Explaining how children map meanings to words is a non-trivial problem; words can have multiple referents (e.g. "bat," "chicken"), or no tangible referent at all (e.g.
"special"). Yet, children learn words extremely quickly, and beginning at 18 months, their rate of word learning increases rapidly in a period commonly referred to as the "word spurt." In her research, Jane hypothesizes that Bayesian inference facilitates the word spurt, and that in a word learning task, children will use exemplar information to determine the referent of a novel word.
Jennifer Kanady
(Clinical Science student advised by
Allison Harvey)
Jennifer's research is entitled The Relationship Between Timing of a Nap, Nap Architecture, and Cognitive Performance.
In her first study, she will empirically examine the differences in sleep architecture of 90-minute naps taken in the early morning (8:00 am), afternoon (1:00 pm), and early evening (6:00 pm) so as to test the hypothesis that naps taken at 8:00 am will contain mostly REM sleep, naps taken at 1:00 pm will contain mostly stage 2 sleep, and naps taken at 6:00 pm will contain mostly SWS.
In her second study, Jennifer will examine whether naps laden with a particular sleep stage show the strongest benefit for certain types of memory processing so as to test her hypothesis that naps rich in REM sleep will show the most benefits for tasks involving creativity and priming, naps rich in stage 2 sleep will show the most benefits for tasks involving procedural memory, and naps rich in SWS will show the most benefits for tasks involving verbal declarative memory.
Alice Moon
(Social/Personality student advised by
Serena Chen and
Oliver John)
Alice's research is entitled The Role of Culture and Ideal Affect in Person Perception: Liking, Friendship Choice, and Relationship Closeness. This research focuses on how culture and emotion influence how we perceive others, what kinds of people we want to interact with, and how we feel about our interactions. In a series of three studies, Alice proposes to examine how culture and emotion influence how we perceive others and whether emotional congruence is associated with positive relationship outcomes. In a world that is rapidly becoming more multicultural, this research has implications for cross-cultural interactions in the realms of business, education, law, politics, healthcare, and everyday relationships.
Michelle Rheinschmidt
(Social/Personality student advised by
Rudy Mendoza-Denton)
Michelle's proposal was entitled Opportunity or obstacle? Triggers of threat among low-income students in educational settings. Her research aims to identify aspects of the college environment that are threatening or intimidating for students from lower-income backgrounds. Michelle is interested in identifying situational cues that trigger threat and a reduced sense of "belonging" in college among these students. In the lab, she seeks to establish a causal connection between SES-relevant situations and the psychological and physical threat responses that may undermine lower-SES students' achievement and well-being.
Fifth-year Clinical Science student Lisa Talbot recently received the
Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology (SSCP) Dissertation Grant Award, which recognizes excellence in dissertation research. The award will be presented
at the 2010 meeting of the ABCT.
Fourth-year Clinical Science student Kate Kaplan received an Honorable Mention for the Student Research Award at the 2009 meeting of the ABCT for her research focused on developing and validating a novel questionnaire assessing hypersomnia in psychiatric disorders. | 