Faculty News

Anniversaries	Honors & Awards	New Faculty
Course news	Miscellaneous

Anniversaries

Professor Pamela Hunt, is celebrating her 10th Anniversary with the Psychology Department
Professor Joe Galano and Professor John Nezlek are celebrating their 30th year

Honors and Awards

Pam Hunt has been named an Arts & Sciences Distinguished Associate Professor of Psychology. This is a three-year Professorship that carries some nice perks. Selection was based on "success in research, teaching, and service and promise of a strong future career at the College."
Pam Hunt has also just been awarded Fellow status in the Association for Psychological Science, one of our two national associations. This award is a recognition of her "sustained outstanding contributions to the advancement of psychological science" and will be announced in the September issue of the society's newspaper, the APS Observer. Pam joins a list of many highly distinguished psychologists.
Peter Vishton spent the spring and summer semesters working with the National Science Foundation as their interim Director for the Developmental and Learning Sciences Program in the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (BCS). BCS supports research to advance the scientific understanding of human cognition, language, social behavior and culture. Click for more specific information about the Developmental and Learning Sciences Program
This is quite an honor for Dr. Vishton.
We congratulate him whole-heartedly!
Neill Watson has been appointed to the Scientific Committee of the World Association for Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapy conference in 2010. The mission of the committee is to develop international collaborative research on the process and outcome of psychotherapy.

New Faculty

Prof. Catherine Forestell

EDUCATION
Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada: Ph.D. Experimental Psychology;
University of New Brunswick, Saint John, NB, Canada: B.Sc. in Biopsychology.

RESEARCH INTERESTS
Flavor and food preference development in children; understanding how early flavor experiences and feeding interactions affect children’s hedonic judgments and their intake of foods; identification of strategies that increase children’s liking and consumption of healthful foods such as fruits and vegetables.

Course Information

Freshman seminar topic

This spring visiting Associate Professor Christy Porter taught a new freshman seminar on Drug Use. The course description reads as follows: This course covers several topics related to the use of illicit and recreational drugs. Discussions will include theoretical perspectives on altered states of consciousness, drug use and addiction; perceptions of the authenticity of drug-related experience; social aspects of sobriety, intoxication, prohibition and deviance; drug use in subcultural identity, and contemporary trends linking drug use and criminal behavior.

Other New Courses

311. Cognitive Psychology.
The course examines human cognition. Topics include: perception, action, attention, memory, thinking, and language. Students will be introduced to the major theoretical perspectives and important empirical research findings from related fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience.

315. Foundations of Learning and Memory.
Explores the basis of complex human and animal behavior from a general-process approach seeking to understand evolved processes of learning that apply to many different situations. Topics: why behavior changes, classical and instrumental conditioning, punishment, biological basis of learning, and animal cognition.

417. Research in Sensation & Perception.
The course is concerned with the processes by which persons come to understand their environment. It considers what changes in the environment stimulate the senses and how the nervous system operates on this change to form projections about the real world. Three lecture hours, two laboratory hours.

Miscellaneous news

Professor Robert Barnet received tenure and will be on research leave during 2007-2008 academic year.
Professor Joe Galano will also be on research leave during 2007-2008 academic year.
Professor Peter Vishton is now the Director of Graduate studies succeeding Lee Kirkpatrick who held the position for 5 years.
Professor Harvey Langholtz will be on leave during academic year 2007-8 and working on a project for the United Nations. The U.N. has "hired" him to draft and edit training materials to be provided to UN peacekeepers on the topics of conflict resolution, civil-military coordination, gender issues in peacekeeping, human rights, child soldiers, and related topics. The project will include meetings at UN Headquarters and trips to several peacekeeping missions in Africa and the Middle East.
Professor Neill Watson organized and moderated a paper session, "Process and Outcome Measures for Person-Centered and Emotion-Focused Therapies," for the 38th annual conference of the international Society for Psychotherapy Research in June in Madison, WI. Brandon Bryan, who is an advanced student in the Psy.D. program, presented one of the papers.