Advances in imaging technology and neuroscience have dramatically changed the field of psychology and that evolution is reflected in a flood of recent faculty hirings in the Department of Psychology.
"There is much more emphasis today on the interface of brain and behavior," says Peter Salovey, chair of the department and editor of the Review of General Psychology. "And there is more of an interest in connecting basic research to troubling clinical and social problems."
There also is much more likely scholarly integration across the subdisciplines within the department, he said, noting that it would not be uncommon now to find an expert in child development, for example, collaborating with a faculty member who is a cognitive neuroscientist.
In addition, says Salovey, there is increased interest in psychology as a major for undergraduates, who see it as a springboard to other professions, such as medicine, law and business. And the public's eagerness for information about the mind and human nature is ever growing, he added.
"The media has really heightened the public's fascination with what psychologists study in their research," Salovey says. "Americans seem to have an insatiable appetite for understanding what makes them tick."
Over the last three years, the psychology department has hired 15 new professors, bringing the department's total to 25 primary faculty members. "And we still have about a half dozen other appointments to make," notes Salovey.
New faculty hired in the area of cognitive psychology will help make Yale one of the pre-eminent institutions in the world in the study of perception, memory and cognitive neuroscience, he says. They are:
Professor Marcia Johnson, who formerly taught at Princeton University, an internationally known expert on brain activities underlying memory. Johnson introduced the notions of reality and source monitoring as ways of understanding the phenomenon of false memories, which is one of the most active areas of research in the field in the last decade.
Assistant Professor Christy Marshuetz, who recently completed her doctoral training at the University of Michigan. Marshuetz works on models of working memory, mostly using brain imaging techniques. Her research has demonstrated three distinct components in working memory tasks: storage, rehearsal and executive functioning.
Assistant Professor Brian Scholl, formerly a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, whose research focuses on objects and attention. His recent work suggests that attention is allocated not just to spatial regions but also to specific objects in the visual field.
Assistant Professor Andrew Hollingworth, who comes to Yale from Michigan State University. Hollingworth studies scene perception and how humans form coherent representations of natural scenes even though our normal perceptions of the world are fleeting sequences of different views.
Three senior faculty have been hired in developmental psychology. In differing ways, they all focus on how children develop their ability to think, says Salovey. They are:
Professor Frank Keil, formerly at Cornell University, who is particularly interested in how children learn concepts. In his current work he has shown how young children already have considerable abstract knowledge early in life and learn to move to the concrete from the abstract.
Professor Paul Bloom, formerly of the University of Arizona, whose research is how children learn language. Bloom also has research interests concerning the perception of intentionality and autism.
Professor Karen Wynn, who also came to Yale from the University of Arizona and who is an expert on infant cognition. The National Institutes of Mental Health has described her research on infants' numerical cognition as one of the most important discoveries in recent years.
Two new faculty members have been hired in the area of social development. They are:
Assistant Professor Todd Little, who most recently was a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education, Center for Psychology and Human Development, in Germany. Little has done substantial work on the role of agency or self-efficacy in school achievement as well as peer and friendship relationships.
Assistant Professor Joseph Mahoney, who was formerly a postdoctoral fellow at Stockholm University in its laboratory for developmental science. Mahoney looks at interventions to address developmental problems. He has helped develop community-based prevention programs that reduce adolescent delinquency, drug use and violent behavior.
Assistant Professor Mitchell Prinstein, a clinical psychologist, who is interested in the links between peer relationships and psychological adjustment, particularly in adolescents. He formerly was a postdoctoral fellow at Brown University School of Medicine's Bradley Hospital.
There are three new faculty in the area of social psychology:
Professor Marianne LaFrance, who formerly was at Boston College and who also teaches in the Women's and Gender Studies Program. One of her research areas is the non-verbal aspect of emotion, especially gender differences in social smiling.
Assistant Professor Geoffrey Cohen, who formerly was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington. Cohen is interested in how differences in race, gender and power, particularly in mentoring relationships, lead to mistrust in social interactions.
Assistant Professor David Armor, who completed his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Armor has done research into the "illusion of objectivity," or, the tendency for people to see themselves as relatively objective, unbiased and accurate, but to see others as less objective and systematically biased.
Finally, the Psychology Department has added two new faculty members in behavioral neuroscience:
Assistant Professor Karen Frick, who was most recently a postdoctoral fellow at Wellesley College. Frick's research focuses upon the way in which learning and memory is dependent upon neurochemical processes that change over a lifetime.
Assistant Professor Mark Packard, who was formerly an assistant professor at the University of New Orleans. Packard studies the organization of memory in the mammalian brain. His research has focused on the hypothesis that the amygdala exerts a modulatory influence on two memory systems in the brain.
"We are excited about representing these cutting-edge scholarly directions in the department," says Salovey, "and are delighted to be able to offer undergraduate and graduate students courses and research supervision in such fascinating aspects of our field."
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