All News

Leah Pranschke ’17 is spending her summer in Manhattan in an internship with HeadCount, a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization that seeks to engage the music community in politics and social activism. HeadCount’s primary function is voter registration, which it achieves through the construction of voter registration booths at concerts throughout the country in cooperation with a constantly expanding list of major musicians and artists.

While many students undertake research projects over the summer, Rachael Feuerstein ’16 is using her vacation to pursue a particularly charged subject of study: the social psychology behind the Holocaust. Her project, "The Psychology of Evil and Perpetration: A Psychological Analysis of Why and How the Holocaust Happened," under the direction of Professor of Religious Studies Heidi Ravven and funded through a Levitt Center grant, “aims to explain why ‘good’ people do bad things, or more generally, why people can do evil, such as commit mass genocide.”

Associate Professor of Psychology Tara McKee presented a poster on May 30 at the 5th World Congress on ADHD in Glasgow, Scotland. The poster, titled “Social-Emotional Correlates of ADHD Symptomatology in College Students,” presented the results of research conducted last summer with the help of Joshua DeVinney ’15 and Courtney Hobgood ’15

Professor of Psychology Jen Borton, juniors Becca Rees and Abby Quirk, and Mark Oakes of St. Lawrence University, presented a poster on Feb. 28 at the annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in Long Beach, Calif.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology Kara Sage published "Controlling the slides: Does clicking help adults learn?" with Hamilton student co-authors Nikole Bonacorsi '15, Sarah Izzo '15, and Abigail Quirk '16. The article was pre-published online this week in the journal Computers and Education and will appear in a forthcoming issue.

Scrutinizing the pages of Where’s Waldo?, searching for that pesky beanie and striped shirt, your brain is working hard to spot the elusive traveler. This summer, four students are examining various components of visual attention with Assistant Professor of Psychology Alexandra List. Katie Callahan ’15, Christi Westlin ’15 and Alex Mitko ’16 are each working on one of the three elements of the study, “Visual Attention: Failures, Dynamics and Interaction with Auditory Attention,” and Hannah Zucker ’15 is doing an interdisciplinary project.

This summer, Abby Quirk ’16, Becca Rees ’16 and Rohan Arcot ’16, under the guidance of Associate Professor of Psychology Jen Borton, are researching defensive self-esteem and its effect on autobiographical memory.

“It's funny how the teacher usually ends up doing the most learning,” Kayla Cody ’15 admitted in regard to her time at the New England Center for Children (NECC). According to Cody, it was her time at the Center in the spring that solidified her passion for children and mental health. This summer, Cody is conducting research with Boston University Assistant Professor of Special Education Dr. Jennifer Green on mental health care services and treatment options for children in the U.S.

In May, New York State Medicare updated its services to include sex reassignment surgery for diagnosed cases of gender dysphoria, the medical term for individuals suffering from a discrepancy between their birth sex and mental gender. Although civil rights for the LGBT community are more permissive than they ever have been, much reform is still needed for this community to experience equality. Kate Cieplicki ’16, a psychology and women’s studies double major, is working in Philadelphia this summer to advance support services for LGBT individuals.

Abigail Keim ’15, with support from the Dan Fielding ’07 Fund, is applying her interest in psychology by interning at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence this summer. The Center for Emotional Intelligence is a research laboratory at Yale University that examines, as Keim put it, “the extent to which emotional intelligence currently affects people’s actions, experiences, and relationships.”