April 2010
Graduate Students from the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior have recently been awarded National Science Foundation Fellowships. Congratulations to Alaine Kalder, Chris Marshburn, and Jennifer Williams for being recognized by the NSF for their exceptional promise.
Research Topics:
Alaine Kalder will research whether maltreatment status predicts false confession in an experimental setting, using a population of juvenile offenders. This sample is ideal as they are likely to have high rates of victimization and have more opportunity to make false confessions. She will also measure salivary cortisol as a possible mediator of risk for false confession.
Chris Marshburn will examine how people react when discussing difficult topics in interpersonal interactions. He is specifically investigating how threats to people's attitudes about social issues influence fluctuations in identity.
Jennie Williams will study the influence of neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics on individual indexes of physical, emotional, and cognitive health. Jennie will take a social ecological approach, enabling her to explore one’s broader context in the search for factors creating and maintaining existing health disparities.