Psychology and Social Behavior
The Department of Psychology and Social Behavior (PSB) at UCI offers exciting and innovative programs of study at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Our 25 faculty members are prominent scholars whose specialties include developmental, social, personality, health, psychology and law, biological, clinical, cultural, community, environmental, and ecological psychology. The faculty are united by an overarching interest in understanding the origins of human behavior as it develops across the life course and in diverse sociocultural contexts. The faculty also share a strong commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship and to research that has the potential for application to important societal problems.
Visit the School of Social Ecology Home page for more information about the school, departments, faculty, and employment opportunities.
(click on icon to view Poster of http://www.psychology.uci.edu/ and PSB/Cog Sci Joint Profile)
ranks
The Department of Psychology and Social Behavior
at the University of California, Irvine
6th under
Psychology, various - 2007
and 10th under
Human Development and Family Studies, General - 2007
Upcoming Events
PSB COLLOQUIUM SERIES
The Series will continue Fall Quarter 2009
FACULTY NEWS
JUNE 2009
Susan Charles has been designated by the Dean and Associate Dean of the School of Social Ecology to receive the 2009 Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research.
Linda Levine has won the 2009-2010 Distinguished
Faculty Award for Teaching.
APRIL 2009
Beth Cauffman has received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation for her work entitled: Violation of Probation and Parole: How Much DMC is There in Parole/Probation Violations? She also received funding from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation to examine out-of-school time in relation to cognitive, psychosocial, and behavioral outcomes among the youths from the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development who have been followed since birth and are now graduating from high school.
On March 8th, Beth Loftus appeared on a segment of CBS 60 Minutes. The show featured a visit to UCI where Leslie Stahl interviewed her in conjunction with a compelling story about wrongful convictions through eyewitness testimony. It can be seen at: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4852677n
Sal Maddi's work on Hardiness was acknowledged with articles in Newsweek (Who Says Stress is Bad for You?), the Wall Street Journal (Why Don't You Want to Die on a Sunday in Detroit?), and in USA Today (As Economic Fears Rise, Families on Verge of Unraveling). On April 25th, he will be giving an invited address on Hardiness as the Pathway to Resilience under Stress at the Western Psychological Association conference in Portland, Oregon.
MARCH 2009
Ellen Greenberger was highlighted in an article in the New York Times on February 18th, 2009 for research with co-authors Jared Lessard, Chuansheng Chen, and Susan P. Farruggia on the topic on Students' Sense of Entitlement: i.e., expectations for good grades for modest effort. The sense of entitlement could be related to increased parental pressure, competition among peers and family members, and a heightened sense of achievement anxiety. This was the most emailed article from the Times in the preceding week.
Beth Loftus delivered the 2009 John McGovern award lecture in Chicago at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February. First delivered in 1990, the John McGovern Lecture honors prominent behavioral scientists from around the world.
Sal Maddi's research team is publishing its findings showing that UCI undergraduates who go through the hardiness training course (now P140H) increase not only in their hardiness levels at the end of the course, but also in their GPAs at graduation. The reference is: Maddi, S.R. Harvey, R.H., Khoshaba, D.M., Fazel, M., & Resurrecccion, N. (2009), Hardiness facilitates performance in college; Journal of Positive Psychology, in press.
FEBRUARY 2009
Loftus Honored by American Psychology Law Society
Elizabeth Loftus, Distinguished Professor of Social Ecology, will receive the 2009 Distinguished Contributions to Psychology and Law Award from the American Psychology-Law Society at its March annual meeting in San Antonio. The annual award is given to researchers who have made distinguished theoretical, empirical and/or applied contributions to psychology and law. Loftus studies the malleable nature of human memory, and her research on the reliability of eyewitness reports and memories “recovered” through therapy has affected how law enforcement agencies and the courts consider such testimony.
Candice Odgers has been named a William T. Grant Scholar. This award is designed for early career researchers (within 7 years of the PhD degree) and is intended to further the Foundation's interest in supporting research that helps understand and improve the settings of youth ages 8 to 25 in the US. This award provides $350,000 of support spread over 5 years and is being extended this year to just 4 young scholars. As you can imagine, the competition for this award is quite strenuous, and winning it carries great distinction. Congratulations to Professor Odgers.
Pregnancy Hormone Predicts Postpartum Depression
Women who have higher levels of a hormone produced by the placenta midway through pregnancy appear more likely to develop postpartum depression, a study authored by UCI researcher Ilona Yim finds. The discovery could help identify and treat women at risk for postpartum depression long before the onset of symptoms. Photo by Daniel A. Anderson. more from Today@UCI» more from Reuters India»
Maddi on Strategies for Surviving Economic Downturn
“People have recovered from this kind of thing before. Rather than bemoaning one’s plight, it’s important to come up with action plans that might make a difference.” – Salvatore R. Maddi, psychology & social behavior professor, commenting on the resilience and resolve necessary to deal with the economic crisis. USA Today, Feb. 2, 2009. more »
Joanne Frattaroli has been appointed to the Editorial Board of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Linda Levine and Joanne Frattaroli won a departmental assessment grant from the Division of Undergraduate Education.
Candice Odgers was awarded funding by Simon Frazier University for her work entitled: Transition to Young Adulthood in Girls at Risk for Aggression and Antisocial Behavior: Risk, Resilience and Developmental Trajectories.
Jennifer Skeem received funding from the American Psychological Association for her research entitled: Using Social Science to Increase Public Safety.
DECEMBER 2008
Elizabeth Loftus gave two lectures in Israel last month. One at the law school at Tel-Aviv University and the other was to the cognitive sciences faculty and students at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
Dan Stokols presented an invited lecture on Transdisciplinary Health Research and Training at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Center for Health Policy, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque on October 23rd. On October 30th, he gave an invited talk on the Evaluation of Team Science and Training Initiatives at the national Heart lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.
Elaine Vaughan was awarded funding from the Department of Homeland Security for her work entitled: Communicating About the Risks of Mass-Casualty Terrorism in Diverse Communities.
NOVEMBER 2008
Ilona Yim received funding from the National Institute of Mental Health for her research entitled: Early Predictors of Postpartum Depression.
OCTOBER 2008
Alcohol education programs that focus on so-called “at-risk youth” are missing half their audience. A new study led by psychologist Candice Odgers shows that, like their at-risk peers, teens with no family history of substance abuse or behavioral problems are more likely to fail in school and develop addictions and sexually transmitted diseases if they experiment with alcohol before their 15th birthday.
more »
Chuansheng Chen has been awarded funding by the National Science Foundation for his work entitled: Collaborative Research: Learning to Read a Second Language: Neural Basis and Individual Variations.
Larry Jamner has been awarded funding from Yale University for his work entitled: T-Wave Alternans in Daily Life.
Psychology and Social Behavior welcomes Angela Lukowski. Angela received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology with a formal minor in Neuroscience from the University of Minnesota in January 2007. The goal of her research is to establish relations among neurodevelopment, memory, and executive function in infants and children undergoing normative developmental trajectories as well as in those with neurodevelopmental insults known to affect the hippocampus and dopamine system.
Elizabeth Loftus, Distinguished Professor of Social Ecology, will deliver the 2009 John P. McGovern Award Lecture in the Behavioral Sciences at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February. The lecture honors prominent behavioral scientists from around the world. Past recipients include Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Loftus studies the malleability of human memory and applies her research to the legal field.
Jodi Quas has been selected as the American Psychological Foundation's 2008 Robert I Franz Memorial Award winner. This award is intended to recognize and encourage promising young investigators in psychology.
Kitty Calavita and Dan Stokols have been named UCI Chancellor's Professors. The title recognizes scholars who have demonstrated unusual academic merit and whose continued promise for scholarly achievement makes them of exceptional value to the university.
Dan Stokols, Chancellor's Professor of Social Ecology, co-edited a special issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine on the Science of Team Science. The issue is aimed at understanding and enhancing the results of collaborative research and training programs. Complex problems like global warming, AIDS, cancer, food security and terrorism require greater collaboration among scientists trained in different fields.
In August, Bill Thompson gave the keynote address Painting the Target around the Arrow: Misleading DNA Statistic, at the International Conference on Forensic Inference and Statistics in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Current and Former Student News
APRIL 2009
Asha Goldweber has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University in the School of Public Health, Drug Dependence Epidemiology Training Program with Dr. William Latimer. She also chaired a symposium at the Annual Psychology and Law Society Conference, where she presented a paper entitled: The Impact of Perceived Facility Safety and Staff Support on Adjustment to Incarceration.
MARCH 2009
Kristen August and Asha Goldweber each received a $10,000 Graduate Dean's Dissertation Quarter Fellowship.
Michael Russell received a Student Research Award from the American Psychological Science Competition.
Gloria Luong is the recipient of the Association for Psychological Science RiSE-UP Research Award. She will accept the award and give an award address at the APS convention in May.
FEBRUARY 2009
Elizabeth Davis received a $5,000 American Psychological Foundation Elizabeth Musterberg Koppitz Graduate Scholarship. This is a very prestigious fellowship given to students whose research promotes the advancement of knowledge in the field of child psychology. The funding will go to support Liz's dissertation, which concerns emotion regulation and memory in children.
Edwin Tan received a travel award to attend the biennial meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development scheduled in April.
Michael Russell received a travel award from the National Institute of Mental Health to attend the 2009 Annual Meeting of the American Psychopathological Association, which will take place in March in New York.
Carrie Carmody, Alexia Cooper, and Eileen Haddad received the Distinguished Paper award for their presentation entitled: Facebook Me: the Changing Shape of Social Interaction and Identity Exploration in Adolescence at the e-Case conference in Singapore.
Asha Goldweber and Edwin Tan have received dissertation fellowships from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.
NOVEMBER 2008
Rachel Lucas-Thompson has been selected as a recipient of a 2008 American Psychological Association Dissertation Research Award. The Science Directorate will publish an announcement of this award in its newsletter Psychological Science Agenda and other outlets.
OCTOBER 2008
PSB welcomes the 2008 Cohort: Nicole Basehore, Jordan Bechtold, David Busse, Cory Clarke, Steven Frenda, Kristen Gamble, Vanessa Juth, Hannah Kang, Rebecca Nichols, Christina Pedram, Michael Russell, Ian Tingen, and Marina White.
PSB graduate student Kristin August received the Proposed Doctoral Research Award from Division 20 of the American Psychological Association and the Retirement Research Foundation. Her award was announced in August at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Boston.
Gary Germo, a lecturer for PSB, is a winner of a SPSSI's Grants-in-Aid for fall 2008 for his project entitled: HPA Functioning Among At-Risk Young Adults: The Role of Maltreatment, Current Stressful Life Events, and Attachment Styles.
Rachel Lucas-Thompson, received a Fellowship from the American Psychological Foundation to support her dissertation study, "Interparental Conflict and Adolescent Physiological Functioning, Health, and Adjustment." This is a national competition, and Rachel was one of only a small number of Ph.D. Candidates to receive this fellowship.
Rachel Lucas-Thompson, PSB graduate student, is a winner of a SPSSI's Grants-in-Aid for spring 2008 for her project entitled: Interparental Conflict and Adolescent Physiological Functioning and Health.
Gloria Luong, PSB graduate student, was awarded the American Psychological Association Division 20 (Adult Development and Aging) Award for Proposed Master's Research in August. She was also selected to serve as the Chair of the American Psychological Association Science Student Council for the upcoming year.
Jennifer Miner and Alison Clarke-Stewart published an article last May in Developmental Psychology, based on her Master's thesis, called The Trajectories of Externalizing Behavior from Age 2 to Age 9: Relations with Gender, Temperament, Ethnicity, Parenting, and Rater.
Recent Ph.D.'s
Doctor Judith Anderson
The Role of Psychological State and Biological Context on Neuroendocrine Stress Response Regulation: A Study of Women of Child Bearing Age
Doctor Marnie Brow
The Role of Personality Following the September 11th Terrorist Attacks: Big Five Trait Combinations and Interactions in Explaining Distress and Coping
Doctor Nathalie Carrick
Fairies are Real but Witches aren't: Children's Evaluations of Emotional Fantasy
Doctor Esther Chang
Shared Agency between Older Youth and Parents: Ethnic Differences and Similarities
Doctor Jennifer Eno-Louden
Effect of Stigma of Mental Disorder and Substance Abuse on Probation Officers' Case Management Decisions
Doctor Gary Germo
Early Adversity and Current Stressors on Adolescents' and Young Adults' Morning Cortisol Levels: The Moderating Role of Attachment Style
Doctor Meret Keller
A Contextual Approach to Understanding the Relations between Family Sleep Arrangements and Young Children's Socio-Emotional Well-Being
Doctor Pamela King
Understanding Adolescents' Motivation for Physical Activity: Utility of the Self-Determination Theory
Doctor Heather Lench
The Relation of Approach Avoidance Goals to Persistence, Affective Judgments and Health
Doctor Lindsay Malloy
Maltreated and Nonmaltreated Children's Evaluations of disclosing an Adult's Wrongdoing
Doctor Jennifer Piazza
Living with Chronic Health Conditions and Functional Disability: Age Differences in Affective Well-Being
Doctor Huy Vu
Acculturation, Intergenerational Conflict and Support, and Psychological Well-Being
Doctor Allison Wallin
The Influence of Parent-Child Attachment on Children's Stress Responses
Doctor Thomas Wicke
Community Response to Trauma: An Ecological Analysis of How Community is Affected by Social Disaster in Laramie, Wyoming and Jasper, Texas
