Click below to learn more about research happening in the department.
Psychology faculty and students engage in basic and applied research across many subdisciplines of the field. As part of the 2023-2024 and beyond Psychology curriculum, all students are required to participate in a psychology-related experiential learning. All BS students and interested BA students may meet this requirement by completing an independent study or other form of empirical research.
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.
Cynthia Clark is an experimental psychologist with a specialization in Behavioral Neuroscience. Her research focuses on psychophysics, the relationship between the physical world and how people experience it. Her past research has explored such things as how certain photoreceptors in the retina contribute to color perception and receptive field size. Other research of hers has investigated spatial vision in the peripheral retina and how this might change as one ages. Generally, Cynthia is interested in how researchers and psychologists understand neurological processing within the visual system at the neurological level of analysis.
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.
Jennifer McCullen’s research broadly concerns the role of emotion regulation as a source of risk and resiliency for mental health. She is interested in investigating how we can best assess positive and negative emotion regulation strategies to elucidate their relation to indices of mental health, including symptoms of stress, trauma, anxiety, and depression. She uses both qualitative and quantitative methodologies and aims to create tools pertaining to emotion regulation that are transportable to vulnerable and underrepresented populations to inform psychological assessment and intervention. Her work has primarily engaged adolescents although she is interested in emotion regulation skills and abilities across the lifespan.
David Moore is a clinical psychologist whose research interests include adolescent and adult development, relationships, and teen parenting. One primary focus is romantic relationships, looking at communication patterns and other factors related to relationship satisfaction and stability, as well as psychological and physical health. Based on his extensive use of mindfulness practices in clinical practices and also the development of a course offered at Puget Sound on the science and practice of mindfulness, Professor Moore has also recently begun investigating the effects of mindfulness and best practices in teaching mindfulness to college students.
Mark Reinitz’s research revolves around memory, sensation, perception, and cognitive neuroscience. He has explored the reliability of memory as it relates to familiarity, recollection, and confidence, and he has analyzed studies of false memories. Mark’s most recent research focuses on factors that cause eyewitnesses in court cases to be confident but inaccurate in their accounts of the crimes they witnessed. Recent projects have investigated when confidence is a poor predictor of the accuracy of memories; whether the memory of a particular feature or just a sense of familiarity with a face leads to more accurate face identification; and how people can create the illusion of a memory by making inferences from one piece of evidence that they did see.
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.
Explore recent independent research projects conducted by Psychology majors.
I assisted in consenting and interviewing research participants for this study. The consenting process follows established guidelines for obtaining informed consent for participating in research. The interviews were structured and designed to establish a clinical diagnosis and severity of symptoms. I also completed neurocognitive testing in subjects using the MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery, and scored the results of their testing. On most test days, I assisted in the completion of EEG testing by fitting subjects with a 64-lead electrode cap. Throughout testing, I helped with various tasks for the comfort of the participants, including getting their lunches from the hospital cafeteria, and bringing them snacks. I completed data entry for all testing into the lab database, helped analyze these data, and designed a poster describing the study and its findings.
I mainly did research interviews via Zoom and some in-person interviews in Tacoma.
The biggest challenge I faced in my research was participant recruitment; since EMTs' and paramedics' work schedules are somewhat unpredictable, it made it a bit hard to meet the deadlines for data collection I had in place for myself. Still, I overcame this by rereading my IRB and recognizing I had left myself the opportunity to conduct interviews via Zoom. This allowed me to be more flexible in the interview process to fit the EMTs' and Paramedics’ schedules better. It taught me to be more patient while collecting data, reminding me to be resourceful in my problem-solving skills and enhancing my ability to pivot.
I conducted a summer research project on the impact of filmmaking techniques on memory and emotionality. As someone passionate about both human psychology and film, I sought to create a study that would allow me to connect my two interests. I found the pre-existing research on the psychological impacts of film to be somewhat lacking, and so I sought to investigate how the use of color and music in a film could impact a viewer’s memory for key details and their emotional response to an anxiety-provoking thriller. I shot a 5-minute thriller with 4 different versions: one with color and music, one in black & white without music, one with just music, and one with just color. Study participants were shown one, and only one, version of the short film and asked to answer a quick questionnaire upon completing the video. The questionnaire was divided into three parts: a free-recall memory section that asked participants to freely recall certain details from the film, an emotionality section that asked participants to place their anxiety levels on a 7-point scale, and a second memory section with multiple choice answers to identical questions from the first memory section to test participant recognition of details.
Sex education primarily focuses on reducing the negative consequences associated with sex, such as STIs, unplanned pregnancies, and violence. Pleasure is often left unaddressed despite the impact it has on not only sexual health, but also physical, mental, and relationship health. Since most research on sex education has similarly focused on addressing the risks of sex, the present study investigated how people learn about pleasure outside of classrooms. Nine female or fem-identifying participants aged 20-24 completed interviews about their experiences learning about sex. They described learning from parents, peers, partners, and media. Grounded theory was used to code interview transcripts and develop a codebook. Overall, participants identified flaws in learning from each source they described, such as uncomfortable learning environments and widespread misinformation. These flaws indicate a need for improvements to sex education, such as promoting communication and media literacy skills.