Faculty
For more information regarding individual faculty research, please click on the name.
Social / Developmental
| Joseph Cunningham | Clinical Psychology. Emotional and cognitive development. |
Professor Cunningham's research interests include developmental and gender differences in emotional experience and communication; nonverbal processes in emotional and cognitive development, and the interaction between perceptual and conceptual development.
| Angela Gutchess | Life-span development. Culture, aging, and memory. |
Professor Gutchess' research investigates the influence of age and culture on memory and social cognition. She is interested in compensatory strategies and neural reorganization, particularly as an effect of context. Her work employs behavioral and neuroimaging (fMRI) methods.
| Derek Isaacowitz | Life-span development. Emotion in adulthood and old age. |
Professor Isaacowitz's research focuses on emotion in adulthood and old age. More specifically, he is interested in the interplay of cognitive processes, particularly attention, and emotion throughout the adult life span. He uses eye tracking technology to study attentional biases that may facilitate individual and age differences in emotion regulation.
| Raymond Knight | Clinical Psychology. Experimental psychopathology. |
Professor Knight's research interests include the assessment of and the taxonomic differentiation among sexually aggressive males (both juveniles and adults) and the assessment of and the identification of core features of psychopathy. He is also interested in the etiology and the prediction of outcome in both sexual aggression and psychopathy.
| Margie Lachman, Department Chair | Life-span development. Adult personality and cognition. |
Professor Lachman's research is in the area of lifespan development with a focus on midlife and later life. Her current work is aimed at identifying psychosocial (e.g., sense of control) and behavioral (e.g., physical exercise) factors that can protect against, minimize, or compensate for declines in cognition (e.g., memory) and health. She is conducting studies to examine long-term predictors of psychological and physical health, laboratory-based experiments to identify psychological and physiological processes involved in aging-related changes, and intervention studies to enhance performance and promote adaptive functioning.
| Xiaodong Liu | Advanced statistics in psychological and educational research. |
Professor Xiaodong Liu research interests include the application of advanced statistics in psychological and educational research; the impacts of familial, communal, and school environments on child and adolescent psychological development and academic achievement; and gender and ethnic issues in child and adolescent psychological adjustment and academic achievement.
| Andrew Molinsky | Cross-Cultural Interactions, Necessary Evils, Organizational Behavior. |
Professor Molinsky's research examines the challenges people face in performing emotionally demanding aspects of their jobs. Specifically, his work focuses on the difficulties entailed in adapting behavior in foreign cultural environments and on the moral and psychological challenges involved in performing necessary evils (causing harm for a perceived greater good) in professional work.
| Malcolm Watson, Undergraduate Advising Head. | Developmental Psychology. |
Professor Watson is a developmental psychologist whose primary research interest focuses on developmental pathways leading to aggression in children and adolescents. He is particularly interested in determining and clarifying the factors involved for a particular type of withdrawn victim who becomes an aggressor. His secondary research interest focuses on the relation between symbolic play, fantasy, and creativity in children
| Leslie Zebrowitz | Social Psychology. Person perception. |
Cognitive Neuroscience
| Paul DiZio, Graduate Advising Head | Human spatial orientation and motor control. |
| József Fiser | Visual information processing. |
Professor Fiser studies the psychological and neural bases of visual perception and learning. He conducts human experiments to examine what visual structures humans are sensitive to and how they form internal representations based on the visual input by learning. He also conducts experiments using multi-electrode recordings of neurons in the visual system to uncover the coding principles the brain uses to represent and to learn from visual experience.
| Maurice Hershenson | Visual Space Perception. Visual information processing. |
Professor Hershenson studies monocular visual space perception: size and shape constancy and the metric of perceived space. Experiments involve tests of the kinetic invariance hypothesis and its role in perceiving rigid and nonrigid moving objects
| Donald Katz | Neural Dynamics of gustatory perception and learning. |
Professor Katz's studies the neural bases of learning. His current research examines the ways in which interactions among simultaneously recorded ensembles of single neurons underlie both the within-trial identification of taste stimuli and between-trial plasticity related to taste learning
| James Lackner | Spatial orientation. Human movement control. Adaptation to unusual force environments. |
| Robert Sekuler | Visual perception. Cognitive processes. |
| Arthur Wingfield | Human Memory. |
| Jerome Wodinsky | Comparative psychology. Learning theory. Sensory physiology. |
Professor Wodinsky's general interests are in the areas of comparative psychology, learning, motivation, and sensory processes. Current research deals with the natural history, descriptive and experimental analyses of feeding and mating behavior, and learning in the octopus.
Visiting Professors
| Ellen Wright ejwright@brandeis.edu x62809 Lemberg 112 |
Clinical Psychology. Depression. Emotion regulation. |
| Professor Wright’s research interests include depression risks and protective factors (including gender, puberty and other developmental processes). She also studies adolescent development of emotion regulation and coping processes, particularly as it relates to depression and bullying. |
| Theodore Cross | tpcross@uiuc.edu | off campus | ||
| Teresa Mitchell | tmitch@brandeis.edu | x63257 | Brown 322a | |
| Irene Pepperberg | imp16@brandeis.edu | x62195 | Foster |
Staff
Phil Gnatowski
Department Administrator
Phone: (781) 736-3302
Email: gnat@brandeis.edu
Evelyn Capone
Undergraduate Academic Coordinator
Phone: (781) 736-3301
Email: capone@brandeis.edu
Donna Coletti
Department/Graduate Coordinator
Phone: (781) 736-3303
Email: coletti@brandeis.edu
Winnie Huie
Senior Department Accounting Associate
Phone: (781) 736-3289
Email: whuie1@brandeis.edu
Department Phone Number: (781) 736-3300
Department Fax Number: (781) 736-3291