Psychology: Diversity in Psychology

 

Faculty and Student Research with Underrepresented Populations

 



Implicit Social Cognition Lab

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Faculty
Brian Nosek Brian Nosek
ban2b@virginia.edu
http://briannosek.com/
 
Graduate students and Post-doc:
Nicole Lindner
nml5d@virginia.edu
Kate Ranganath
ranganath@virginia.edu
Colin Smith
cts2e@virginia.edu
 
Links:
Lab site: http://projectimplicit.net/
Web-based research site: http://implicit.harvard.edu/

Our main interests concern thought and feeling that exists outside of conscious awareness or conscious control. In particular, we examine (a) the predictors of correspondence between implicit and explicit preferences, (b) the presence of cognitive-affective consistency in implicit social cognition, (c) the role of implicit attitudes, beliefs, and identity in orientation toward math and science, (d) evidence for multiple or dynamic implicit evaluative processes, (e) the consequences of implicit attitudes and beliefs in judgment and behavior, and (f) methodological developments for investigations of implicit social cognition. These interests are applied in domains of social import such as: ethnicity and prejudice, the participation of women in science, and the relationship between ideology, beliefs, and bias. For example, stereotypes that are not endorsed may still influence judgments or behaviors through their representation in memory even when those representations are not consciously accessible. The qualities of implicit social cognition provide a novel avenue of investigation into the relationship among concepts like attitude, belief and identity, and the freedoms and constraints that accompany membership in social groups.

 


The Full Potential Initiative

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Faculty
Fred Smyth Fred Smyth
fsmyth@virginia.edu
http://fullpotentialinitiative.org
fsmyth@virginia.edu

The Full Potential Initiative, or FPI, aims to increase understanding of the developmental course and impact of implicit attitudes and stereotypes in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) domains, especially as they may differentially affect the persistence and productivity of girls, women and underrepresented minorities. FPI is directed by UVa Psychology Department faculty Brian Nosek and Fred Smyth and is supported with a grant from the National Science Foundation (REC-0634041). See our website to learn more: http://fullpotentialinitiative.org

 


Shigehiro Oishi

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Faculty Member
Shigehiro Oishi
soishi@virginia.edu

George W. Bush said in his inaugural speech "What binds America is not blood or birth or soil but ideals that move us beyond our backgrounds" and that "every immigrant, by embracing these ideals, makes our country more, not less, American." Indeed, cultural diversity has long been an ideal of American society. My students and I believe that cultural diversity is not only an important social issue, but also a critical empirical issue in psychology. Our research aims to identify the conditions under which people feel understood or misunderstood by others with different socio-cultural backgrounds (e.g., race, nationality, religion, SES, political orientation). Our long-term goal is to discover the factors that enhance cross-cultural understanding.

 


Felicity Miao

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Graduate Student ffm5m@virginia.edu

Melvin N. Wilson

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Faculty Member
Melvin Wilson
mnw@virginia.edu

Dr. Melvin Wilson has an extensive background in academic, research and training activities generally focused on understanding contextual processes and outcomes in African American families and service delivery in domestic violence issues. His current research interests focus on young, low-income, unwed, and nonresident fathers. In addition, he is working on developing intervention protocols aimed at helping young men meet family responsibilities and involvements..

Currently, Dr. Wilson is conducting a preventative intervention evaluation study as part of a multi-site research project designed to prevent the early-onset of conduct problems among 720 toddlers from low-income African American, Latino and Caucasian families. This project is embedded within the Women, Infants, and Children Nutritional Supplement Program (WIC) Centers in urban (Pittsburgh, PA), suburban (Eugene, OR), and rural (Charlottesville, VA) locations and emphasizes client concerns as momentum toward behavior change in the intervention model. A primary focus of this study is tailoring the intervention to diverse cultural and geographic backgrounds of families.


Jennifer O'Neil

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Graduate Student jo2t@virginia.edu

Using data from the Early Steps Project, developed by my advisor Melvin Wilson and colleagues, I am currently working on my dissertation project which examines the risk and protective factors for depression in African American mothers. I am interested in exploring both the trajectory and pattern of depressive symptoms experienced by the mothers as well as how factors related to race, gender, and socioeconomic status affect their experience of depression. In previous projects, I explored ethnic differences in parental efficacy and their effects on depressive symptoms and child outcomes as well as ethnic differences in depression and service utilization.


Monica Savoy

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Graduate Student mps3p@virginia.edu

I am interested in the psychological health and well-being of African American youth and families. More specifically, exploring the factors of risk behaviors among African American male adolescents, parental involvement and family functioning.

 


Amori Mikami

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Faculty Member
Amori Mikami
mikami@virginia.edu

Amori Mikami and her lab research the causes and consequences of peer rejection, as well as interventions for social problems. As part of this investigation, Professor Mikami is studying things teachers do to encourage their students to be more tolerant of peers who are different from them, and ultimately more likely to build friendships with diverse groups of children.

 


Charlotte Patterson

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Faculty Member
Charlotte Patterson
cjp@Virginia.EDU

How does parental sexual orientation affect child development? Much of my recent work has been designed to address this question. Together with students and other colleagues, I have conducted studies of child development among youngsters who were conceived by lesbian or heterosexual parents, using the resources of a single sperm bank; I have studied children parented by lesbian and heterosexual parents both in Northern California and in Central Virginia; and I have studied data about teenagers living with same-sex couples that are drawn from national samples of adolescents in the United States. Our findings suggest that, while the offspring of lesbian mothers are developing in positive ways, and are in fact difficult to distinguish from the children of heterosexual parents on many assessments, they do experience upbringings that are different in some respects from those of youngsters growing up with heterosexual parents. For instance, lesbian and heterosexual couples describe their divisions of labor in quite different ways, with heterosexual couples more likely to specialize - he in paid employment and she in unpaid household work and childcare - and lesbian couples more likely to share both paid and unpaid labor evenly. I am interested in learning more about what impact this and other differences in their upbringings may have on the offspring of lesbian and gay parents. Studies that are currently underway include an internet survey of lesbian and gay families with children, a study of lesbian, gay, and heterosexual couples, and their adoptive children, and a study of fertility intentions of young adults in sexual minority communities. I hope that this research will shed light on classic questions about what is important in parenting as well as on contemporary legal and policy issues relevant to sexual orientation and family life.

 


Rachel Farr

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Graduate Student farr@virginia.edu

Currently, within Charlotte Patterson's lab, I am working on an adoptive families study regarding two-parent families and their young children (ages one to five years). Adoptive parenting couples include approximately equal numbers of gay dads, lesbian moms, and heterosexual parents. We are interested in exploring how gender and sexual orientation of parents are related to child adjustment, parenting approaches, and family relationships.


Rachel Riskind

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Graduate Student riskind@virginia.edu

Parenthood is one of the most universal and valued experiences of American adults. Interestingly, lesbian and gay adults in the U.S. are much less likely than heterosexual adults to become parents. Working with Charlotte Patterson, I am interested in exploring the psychology of family formation as a function of sexual orientation. I hope that our work will contribute to ongoing debates about sexual orientation and parenthood.


Samantha Tornello

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Graduate Student slt6a@virginia.edu

Along with Charlotte Patterson, I am currently studying families headed by gay fathers. I want to get a better understanding of how these families are being created, how they work, and to learn more about the relationship between parents. Specifically, I want to understand the division of labor in these families and the connection it may have to relationship satisfaction.


Jim Coan

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Faculty Member jcoan@virginia.edu

Dr. Coan studies the neural mechanisms underlying emotion, emotion-regulation and the social regulation of emotion--a process he calls "social affect regulation". Social affect regulation occurs when, for example, one individual works to soothe the stress and fear of another. Recent work in his laboratory has emphasized the study of how individuals in gay and lesbian relationships regulate each other's neural responses to threat cues. This work utilizes functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and simple hand holding under conditions of mild laboratory induced anxiety. The benefits of social affect regulation for the health and well being of heterosexual couples is widely known and reported. By contrast, gay and lesbian individuals have largely been excluded from work in this area. In addition to his work with gay and lesbian relationships, Dr. Coan has been dedicated to the study of low-income, community samples in his work on the neurophysiology of emotion.


Dick Reppucci

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Faculty Member ndr@virginia.edu

My focus is on Children and the law, and preventive interventions, especially in juvenile justice. There are three major projects currently ongoing in my research lab: 1) police perceptions of juvenile offenders and their interrogation, especially in terms of developmental maturity and competence; 2) etiology of serious juvenile female offenders and their relation to aggression and violence, with special attendance to resiliency, risk and protective factors; and 3) transitions from incarceration to community for juveniles, with special attention to schools and families. All of these areas have especial relevance for ethnic minority members. Moreover on all of these projects we work closely with police departments, the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice and Charlottesville/Albemarle Legal Aid Social Justice Center.

 


John Nesselroade

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Faculty Member
John Nesselroade
jrn8z@virginia.edu

My research is focused on personality and ability development and change, broadly defined. I also work on the development of methods and techniques for measuring and modeling such changes. Both long-term, developmental changes and shorter-term, within person variability are of interest to my students and me. Our research of the past decade or so has been conducted primarily on older adult samples.

 


John Bonvillian

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Faculty Member
John Bonvillian
jdb5b@virginia.edu

My principal research focus in recent years has been the development of a simplified sign communication system. This project is built on the findings of earlier studies of sign language acquisition in children of deaf parents and of motor and language processing in children with autistic disorder. Because nearly half of all children with autistic disorder historically have failed to acquire useful speech, many of these speech-limited children were taught signs to communicate. In many instances, the signs taught were from American Sign Language (ASL), the sign language used by Deaf persons in the United States. These signs, however, often are difficult for children with autistic disorder to form and to remember. In our efforts to devise a simpler sign system, we have tried to create signs that are easy to form motorically and that are highly iconic (i.e., clearly resemble the concepts for which they stand). Studies of sign learning and recall involving college students have shown that these simplified signs are much more readily learned and recalled than ASL signs. Preliminary findings with atypical populations also indicate that our simplified signs are quite successfully learned. Finally, although our initial goal was to develop an effective sign communication system for children with autistic disorder and with mental retardation, we now believe that the system may prove beneficial for a much wider population (e.g., hearing-impaired elderly clients in nursing home facilities).

 


KLIFF Lab

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Faculty
Joe Allen Joe Allen
allen@virginia.edu

Kids' Lives, Families, and Friends (KLIFF) is our ongoing longitudinal study examining the influence of social relationships, autonomy, and attachment processes on adolescent development. In this study, we are working to learn more about how young teenagers develop and manage friendships with their peers, and how family relationships influence qualities of these peer relationships and teens susceptibility to peer pressure.

Sixth, seventh, and eighth grade students were recruited from a local middle school in Charlottesville, Virginia. We have 185 families in our study, with over 700 visits happening each year! The sample included 105 European American adolescents, 49 African American, and 20 that identified themselves as other/unspecified. The adolescents were of diverse family socioeconomic status, with the parents reporting a mean family income of $40,000 - $59,9999. Thirty-three percent of the parents reported a total family income above $60,000 while 44% of reported an income below $40,000.
In our first wave of our study, our teens came in with their parental figures and later came in with their closest friend. Two additional friends of the teen also provide additional information. We are currently in our sixth wave of study and are eager to continue learning more about them as they grow older.

Data is collected about several different areas of adolescence, such as the quality of family relationships, friendships, peer pressure, school achievement, delinquency, and internalizing behaviors. The project uses a variety of measurement methods, including self-reports, semi-structured interviews, parent-reports, peer reports, and observations of family and peer interactions.

 


Eric Turkheimer

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Faculty
Eric Turkheimer
ent3c@virginia.edu
 
Graduate student
Monica Williams
mt4h@virginia.edu

We are doing work on racial differences (specifically Black/White) on measures of anxiety.


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