St. Mary’s College Professor Assesses Parental Ignoring on Children’s Emotional Competence
Archives for 2015
Dr. Nathan Foster published in The Journal of Memory and Language
Congratulations to Dr. Nathan Foster on his recent publication!
Foster, N. L., Dunlosky, J., & Sahakyan, L. (2015). Is awareness of the ability to forget (or remember) critical for demonstrating directed forgetting? The Journal of Memory and Language, 85, 88-100. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2015.06.009 (read the article)
Dr. Aileen Bailey and alumni published in Journal of Neurophysiology
Congratulations to Aileen Bailey on her latest publication written in conjunction with professional colleagues and alumni!
Dr. Aileen Bailey nets $200,000+ Research Grant
“Stress, depression, and effects of novel antidepressants on excitatory synapses” is funded by NIH (National Institutes of Health). The award will be used to hire SMCM summer research assistants over the next five years and to support the research itself.
In collaboration with Scott Thompson, of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, who will serve as principal investigator, Dr. Bailey will be examining the behavioral effects of a novel antidepressant drug. Specifically, she will be looking to see if this novel antidepressant can restore normal behavioral responses across several different models of depression (i.e., does the drug work in different situations and on different behaviors). Does it have a general effect? Additionally, she will be looking at behavioral side effects of the antidepressant including changes in sleep and awake activity patterns.
Congratulations, Aileen!
Dr. Libby Williams Publishes Book Chapter
Congratulations to Dr. Libby Williams on her latest publication!
Williams, E. N. (2015). Navigating work and family connections across the lifespan. In Juntunen, C. L & Schwartz, J. P. (Eds.), Counseling across the lifespan: prevention and treatment, second edition (pp. 303-319). Thousand Oaks, CA : Sage Publications, Inc.
From Amazon.com:
Counseling Across the Lifespan by Cindy L. Juntunen and Jonathan P. Schwartz is a practical book that helps readers provide effective mental, emotional, and behavioral health services to clients across the continuum of care, from health promotion through long-term treatment and remediation. Anchoring each chapter within a life stage—from childhood through older adulthood—the text identifies the nature and origin of various psychological issues and emphasizes the importance of anticipating and responding early to concerns that arise for large portions of the population. The Second Edition features new chapters and expanded coverage of important topics, such as sociocultural contextual factors and interprofessional health perspectives.
Dr. Scott Mirabile published in European Journal of Developmental Psychology
Congratulations to Dr. Scott Mirabile on his latest publications!
In June: Mirabile, S. P. (2015). Ignoring children’s emotions: a novel ignoring subscale for the Coping with Children’s Negative Emotions Scale. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 1-13. doi: 10.1080/17405629.2015.1037735
Read more about this research here.
In August: Mirabile, S. P. & *Kodluboy, C. (2015). Description and validation of a teacher-report version of the Self-Expressiveness in the Family Questionnaire. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 1-10. doi: 10.1080/17405629.2015.1060215
*denotes student co-author
40 Students Inducted Into Psi Chi
On March 27, 2015, 40 students were inducted into St. Mary’s College of Maryland chapter of Psi Chi, the International Honor Society in Psychology. It was the largest cohort our chapter has ever inducted!
Congratulations to Aleli Andres, Allison Barrett, Meagan Blizzard, Emily Burr, Claire Cohen, Denise Crane, Caroline Davy, Michelle DiMenna, Amber Drake, Genevieve Dubroof, Frances Duncan, Kayla Dunn, Elizabeth Dunwiddie, Amanda Erdman, Zoey Forrester-Fronstin, Robert Frauman, Sherri Frisco, Mary Gill, Robin Goldman, Dylan Hadfield, Jonathan Herald, Emily Huber, Olivia Hussey, Nabiha Kasmani, Jessica Konecke, Haley Krauss, Rebecca LaMora, Megan LeSavage, Elena London, Margaret Marcelli, Elena Morrissey, Katherine Niccolini, Rebecca Partan, Nadine Postolache, Haley Rizkallah, Rachel Solomon, Rachael Sowers, William Stokes, Caroline White, and Hannah Yeager.
Congratulations to Dr. Anne Marie Brady who recently published a video-based article (and won an award in support of production costs)!
Brady, A. M., Floresco, S. B. Operant Procedures for Assessing Behavioral Flexibility in Rats. J. Vis. Exp. (96), e52387, doi:10.3791/52387 (2015).
Abstract
Executive functions consist of multiple high-level cognitive processes that drive rule generation and behavioral selection. An emergent property of these processes is the ability to adjust behavior in response to changes in one’s environment (i.e., behavioral flexibility). These processes are essential to normal human behavior, and may be disrupted in diverse neuropsychiatric conditions, including schizophrenia, alcoholism, depression, stroke, and Alzheimer’s disease. Understanding of the neurobiology of executive functions has been greatly advanced by the availability of animal tasks for assessing discrete components of behavioral flexibility, particularly strategy shifting and reversal learning. While several types of tasks have been developed, most are non-automated, labor intensive, and allow testing of only one animal at a time. The recent development of automated, operant-based tasks for assessing behavioral flexibility streamlines testing, standardizes stimulus presentation and data recording, and dramatically improves throughput. Here, we describe automated strategy shifting and reversal tasks, using operant chambers controlled by custom written software programs. Using these tasks, we have shown that the medial prefrontal cortex governs strategy shifting but not reversal learning in the rat, similar to the dissociation observed in humans. Moreover, animals with a neonatal hippocampal lesion, a neurodevelopmental model of schizophrenia, are selectively impaired on the strategy shifting task but not the reversal task. The strategy shifting task also allows the identification of separate types of performance errors, each of which is attributable to distinct neural substrates. The availability of these automated tasks, and the evidence supporting the dissociable contributions of separate prefrontal areas, makes them particularly well-suited assays for the investigation of basic neurobiological processes as well as drug discovery and screening in disease models.
Congratulations to Dr. Wes Jordan on his latest publication!
Jordan, W.P., Todd, T. P., Bucci, D. J. & Leaton, R. N. (2015). Habituation, latent inhibition, and extinction. Learning & Behavior. Online publication. doi:10.3758/s13420-015-0168-z
Abstract
In two conditioned suppression experiments with a latent inhibition (LI) design, we measured the habituation of rats in preexposure, their LI during conditioning, and then extinction over days. In the first experiment, lick suppression, the preexposed group (PE) showed a significant initial unconditioned response (UR) to the target stimulus and significant long-term habituation (LTH) of that response over days. The significant difference between the PE and nonpreexposed (NPE) groups on the first conditioning trial was due solely to the difference in their URs to the conditioned stimulus (CS)—a habituated response (PE) and an unhabituated response (NPE). In the second experiment, bar-press suppression, little UR to the target stimulus was apparent during preexposure, and no detectable LTH. Thus, there was no difference between the PE and NPE groups on the first conditioning trial. Whether the UR to the CS confounds the interpretation of LI (Exp. 1) or not (Exp. 2) can only be known if the UR is measured. In both experiments, LI was observed in acquisition. Also in both experiments, rats that were preexposed and then conditioned to asymptote were significantly more resistant to extinction than were the rats not preexposed. This result contrasts with the consistently reported finding that preexposure either produces less resistance to extinction or has no effect on extinction. The effect of stimulus preexposure survived conditioning to asymptote and was reflected directly in extinction. These two experiments provide a cautionary procedural note for LI experiments and have shown an unexpected extinction effect that may provide new insights into the interpretation of LI.
Congratulations to Dr. Laraine Glidden who has just been awarded the Edgar A. Doll Award!
The Edgar A. Doll Award of APA Division 33 (Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities) is a career award that honors an individual for his or her substantial contributions to the understanding of intellectual or developmental disabilities throughout their career.
Dr. Glidden will be giving an invited address at the APA convention this coming August.