830: 501
Introductory Proseminar
Fall 2008

http://crab.rutgers.edu/~btucker/Proseminar08.html

btucker@camden.rutgers.edu

Instructor: Bill Tucker                          Office: 225-6545

Office: Armitage 345                           Home: 354-0119

Office hours: Mon & Tues 5:00-6:00       Department: 225-6520

Goals of the Course:

     To familiarize beginning graduate students with the work of members of the department.
     To broaden students' knowledge of the different substantive areas within the field of psychology.
     To suggest possible research opportunities for students and assist them in the eventual selection of a mentor.


Course Description:

     There are 14 meetings of this course.  In a fortuitous coincidence, allowing for an introductory meeting and a conclusion, there are then 12 classes and 12 faculty members in psychology.  (Actually there are 11, but Professor Dan Hart, the director of the Childhood Studies Program is a psychologist both by training and by area of research, and he has graciously agreed to present his work in the proseminar.)

     Thus, during the first half of the class, each week a different faculty member will speak on his/her research.  To give you an idea of people’s career path and the trajectory of research interests over time--of how one question or topic leads to another--I have asked each faculty member to begin with some biographical remarks, describing what led to an interest in psychology, his/her area of concentration in graduate school and the path from that topic to present research projects.  

     The second half of each meeting will be devoted to a discussion of the speaker's work, in which the class can ask questions and offer comments on the research.  Everyone should be prepared to take part in this exchange, and in reacting to a faculty member’s research you should not hesitate to critique the work and to suggest how this research might be extended and what practical application it might have.

     At the end of the course I will ask you to submit a formal paper on one of the areas of research discussed in class.  Additional details will be provided near the end of the semester.


Evaluation:

     Grade will be determined on the basis of class participation and the final paper, equally weighted.

Schedule

DATE FACULTY MEMBER & FIELD READING

8 Sep

Introduction to the course

15 Sep

Bill Tucker History of Psychology

Tucker, W.H. (1994). The Science and Politics of Racial Research. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 54-110. Tucker, W.H. (2003). A closer look at the Pioneer Fund: Response to Rushton. Albany Law Review, 66, 1145-1159. Tucker, W.H. (2009). Chapters 1 and 2 of The Cattell Controversy: Race, Science, and Ideology. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press.

22 Sep

Naomi Marmorstein Clinical Psychology

Glantz. M.D. & Leshner, A.I. (2000). Drug use and developmental psychopathology. Development and Psychopathology, 12, 795-814. Marmorstein, N.R., Malone, S.M. & Iacono, W.G. (2004). Psychiatric disorders among offspring of depressed mothers: Associations with paternal psychopathology. American Journal of Psychiatry, 161, 1588-1594. Marmorstein, N.R. (in press). Longitudinal associations between alcohol problems and depressive symptoms: Early adolescence through early adulthood. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. Marmorstein, N.R., Iacono, W.G., & McGue, M. (in press). Alcohol and illicit drug dependence among parents: Associations with offspring externalizing disorders. Psychological Medicine.

29 Sep

Charlotte Markey Health Psychology

Friedman, H.S., Tucker, J.S., Schwartz, J.E., Tomlinson-Keasey, C., Martin, L.R., Wingard, D.L. & Criqui, M.H. (1995). Psychosocial and behavioral predictors of longevity. American Psychologist, 50, 69-78. Markey, C.N., Markey, P.M. & Birch, L.L. (2001). Interpersonal predictors of dieting practices among married couples. Journal of Family Psychology, 15, 464-475. Markey, C.N., Markey, P.M. & Tinsley, B.J. (2003). Personality, puberty, and preadolescent girls’ risky behaviors: Examining the predictive value of the Five-Factor Model of personality. Journal of Research in Personality, 37, 405-419. Markey, C.N., Gomel, J.N., & Markey, P.M. (2008). Romantic relationships and eating regulation:  An investigation of partners’ attempts to control each others’ eating behaviors. Journal of health Psychology, 13, 422-432.

6 Oct

Sean Duffy Early Childhood & Cross-Cultural

Duffy, S., & Kitayama, S. (in preparation). Cultural modes of seeing through cultural modes of being: Cultural influences on visual attention. To appear in E. Balcetis & G.D. Lassiter (Eds.) The Social Psychology of Visual Perception. Duffy, S., & Verges, M. (under review). Forces of nature affect implicit connections with nature. Journal of Environmental Psychology Duffy, S., & Verges, M. (in press). It matters a hole lot: Perceptual affordances of waste containers influence recycling compliance. Environment and Behavior. Verges, M. & Duffy, S. (under review). Spatial Representations Elicit Dual-Coding Effects in Mental Imagery. Cognitive Science

13 Oct

Karen Thierry Children's Memory

Lamb, M.E. & Thierry, K.L. (2005). Understanding children’s testimony regarding their alleged abuse: Contributions of field and laboratory analog research. In D.M. Teti (Ed.), Handbook of Research Methods in Developmental Psychology (pp. 489-508). Malden, Mass.: Blackwell. Thierry, K.L. & Spence, M.J. (2002). Source-monitoring training facilitates preschoolers’ eyewitness memory performance. Developmental Psychology, 38, 428-437. Thierry, K.L., Lamb, M.E. & Orbach, Y. (2003). Awareness of the origin of knowledge predicts child witnesses’ recall of alleged sexual and physical abuse. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 17, 953-967. Thierry, K.L. (in press). Practice retrieving source enhances young children’s discrimination of live and story events. Applied Developmental Psychology.

20 Oct

Tara Woolfolk Diversity and Education

Walker, A.J. (2000). Refracted knowledge: Viewing families through the prism of social science. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 62, 595-608. Unger, D.G., Cuevas, T. & Woolfolk, T. (2007). Human services and cultural diversity: Tenuous relationships, challenges, and opportunities ahead. In B.S. Trask & R.R. Hamon (eds.), Cultural Diversity and Families: Expanding Perspectives. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

27 Oct

Luis Garcia Human Sexuality

Garcia, L. (1983). Sexual stereotypes and attributions about sexual arousal. Journal of Sex Research, 19, 366-375. Garcia, L. & Derfel, B. (1983). Perception of sexual experience: The impact of nonverbal behavior. Sex Roles: A Journal of Research, 9, 871-878. Garcia, L. (2006). Perceptions of sexual experience and preferences for dating and marriage. Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, 15, 85-94. Garcia, L. & Markey, C. (in press). Matching in sexual experience for married, cohabiting, and dating couples. Journal of Sex Research. Garcia, L. & Carrigan, D. (1998). Individual and gender differences in sexual self-perceptions. Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality, 10, 59-70. Garcia, L. (1999). The certainty of the sexual self-concept. Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, 8, 263-270. Garcia, L., Cieselka, C., & Fuchs, D. (1999). Social comparison processes in sexual self-perception,  Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality, 11, 35-42. Garcia, L. & Hoskins, R. (2001). Actual-ideal self discrepancy and sexual esteem and depression. Journal of Psychology and Human Sexuality, 13, 49-61. Garcia, L., Cavalie, C., Goins, L., & King, E. (under review).  Enjoyment of sexual activities and attributions of enjoyment to the other gender.

3 Nov

Bill Whitlow Reasoning & Decision Making

Dickinson, A. (2001). Causal learning: Association versus computation. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10, 127-132. Whitlow, J.W. Jr., (submitted). Effects of outcomes and orienting frameworks on configural learning in causal reasoning. Wagner, A.R. (2003). Context-sensitive elemental theory. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 56B, 7-29. Melchers, K.G., Shanks, D.R. & Lachnit, H. (2008). Stimulus coding in human associative learning: Flexibles representations of parts and wholes. Behavioral Processes, 77, 413-427.

10 Nov

Mary Bravo Visual Processes

Wolfe, J.M., Kluender, K.R., Levi, D.M., Bartoshuk, L.M., Herz, R.S., Klatzky, R.L. & Lederman, S.J. (2006). Sensation & Perception (chapter 8). Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer Associates. Available here. Bravo, M.J. & Farid, H. (2008). A scale invariant measure of image clutter. Journal of Vision, 8, 1-9. Bravo, M.J. & Farid, H. (submitted). The specificity of the search template.

17 Nov

Zissis Pappas Human Factors

Pappas, Z. & Arien, M. (2008).Potentiation of action by undetected affordant objects. Visual Cognition.

24 Nov

Dan Hart Adolescent Development

Evans, G.W. (2004). The environment of childhood poverty. American Psychologist, 59, 77-92. Hart, D., Atkins, R., Markey, P. & Youniss, J. (2004). Youth bulges in communities. Psychological Science, 15, 591-597.Gerbarg, P.L., Hart, D., Eisenberg, N., & Valiente, C. (2007). Personality change at the intersection of autonomic arousal and stress. Psychological Science, 18, 492-497. Hart, D., Atkins, R. & Matsuba, M.K. (2008). The association of neighborhood poverty with personality change in childhood. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94, 1048-1061.

1 Dec

Ira Roseman Human Emotions

Roseman, I.J. (2001). A model of appraisal in the emotion system. In K.R. Scherer, A. Schorr & T. Johnstone (Eds.), Appraisal Processes in Emotion (pp. 68-91). New York: Oxford University Press. Roseman, I. J., Spindel, M. S., & Jose, P. E. (1990). Appraisals of emotion-eliciting events: Testing a theory of discrete emotions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 899-915. Roseman, I. J., & Evdokas, A. (2004). Appraisals cause experienced emotions: Experimental evidence. Cognition and Emotion, 18, 1-28. Roseman, I.J., Swartz, T.S., Newman, L., & Nichols, N. (submitted). Phenomenology, behaviors, and goals also differentiate positive emotions.

8 Dec

Conclusion