Carolyn Weisz, Professor, Psychology

Carolyn Weisz is a social psychologist with research interests in social perception, social identity, racism and prejudice, and homelessness. Her recent research on homelessness, conducted in collaboration with other scholars and the Pierce County Department of Community Connections, has focused on links between stigma, psychological distress, and physical health; racial disparities in homelessness; trauma; smoking; emotional labor among service providers; and organizational diversity climate. She serves on the leadership team of the University of Puget Sound’s Race and Pedagogy Institute and conducts research evaluating the impact of the Initiative’s events.

Tim Beyer, Professor, Psychology

Tim Beyer is a developmental psychologist who is interested in how we make sense of what we hear. His research generally focuses on language comprehension in both monolinguals and bilinguals. He uses eye-tracking and reaction time measures to investigate the real-time processing and comprehension of language, focusing on how language minorities use standard American English grammatical morphology. More details about Tim's research can be found at www.tim-beyer.com.

Erin Colbert-White, Associate Professor, Chair, Psychology

Erin Colbert-White is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Puget Sound. Her research concerns features and outcomes of social interactions in a variety of social species. She studies parrot–human social relationships at the individual and group level in her work with parrots. This includes in-depth qualitative and quantitative measures of interactions between one parrot and its owner and work on nonverbal behavior and cue use across multiple individuals. The overarching purpose is to investigate the extent to which parrots adopt human-like social and verbal behavior.

With other species, her interests are also concerned with social cognition. This includes intra-species social behavior such as assessing empathy or altruism and inter-species social behavior such as social referencing cue use by dogs. More details about her research can be found at www.erincolbertwhite.com.

Melvin Rouse, Associate Professor, Psychology

Melvin Rouse’s research looks at how hormones, the brain, and reproductive behavior interact. His lab uses songbirds as a model system. This model is unique in that it allows for the ability to study how gonadal hormones act to modulate patterns of learning and behavior, as well as how hormones affect the perception of behavior. These studies demonstrate the influence of the endocrine system on brain plasticity, learning, and social behavior. Rouse teaches in the areas of behavioral neuroscience, hormones and behavior, research methods and statistics, and comparative neuropsychology. Professor Rouse is on sabbatical during Fall semester 2023.