An experiment that was part of the study, now published in Ecopsychology, showed that students reported increased mindfulness towards the environment after performing ecological attachment tasks like contemplating nature, or practicing environmental preservation tasks like recycling and limiting electricity usage.
At Notre Dame’s William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families, psychology experts address and study other aspects of health that contribute to healthy family life. Having to turn a physical space that is normally bustling with moms and dads and their children into a virtual environment that preserves research continuity and continues to provide services is not easy, but that’s exactly what the Shaw Center researchers and staff are doing. Several programs at the center have been converted to a telehealth model, including the child and family therapy clinic and a number of parenting programs such as the Notre Dame Families & Babies Study (ND-FABS).
Students, parents of students, alumni, faculty and staff, have donated nearly $40,000 toward the coronavirus response in St. Joseph County — specifically for personal protective equipment (PPE) for health workers and others who may come into close contact with the virus.
A now-former postdoc at the University of Notre Dame, Department of Psychology recently posted hateful, racist messages on Facebook, including on the pages of some current and former students of the University. Members of the Department were stunned and horrified by these posts and quickly rallied in support of all those targeted or affected by the appalling messages.
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Laura Miller-Graff, an assistant professor of psychology and peace studies, along with co-principal investigator Kathryn Howell of the University of Memphis and a team of Notre Dame faculty members, will evaluate the intervention program through a randomized, controlled trial involving more than 200 women and their infants.
In this Q&A, Brooke Ammerman, an assistant professor of psychology, discusses her research on the risk factors and protective factors for self-injurious behaviors, how her work maps onto the University mission, and why undergraduate and graduate students are essential to her research.
Erin walked into the fall career fair her senior year — and walked away with a job at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. She visited the FBI’s booth, secured an interview for the next day, and was promptly offered an entry-level position. “My job hunt was very easy because of that one choice,” she said. “I just went to the career fair, and that was it — that was how it all started.” Now an analyst, Erin has connected to a network of Notre Dame alumni at the FBI — and said graduates from every major are valuable to the bureau.
Kristin Valentino, the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families Associate Professor of Psychology, has been named the director of the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families beginning July 1, 2019. Julie Braungart-Rieker, Mary Hesburgh Flaherty and James F. Flaherty III College Chair and Professor of Psychology, served in this role from 2008-2019 and is stepping down in preparation to become the chair of the Department of Psychology in the fall of 2020.…
Student engagement has long been recognized as key to academic success. Most research, however, has focused on engagement generally, across the school setting. Quantitative psychologist Ying “Alison” Cheng is working to better understand the link between student engagement and learning outcomes in a specific course — and how adaptive testing can help.
In labs, at conferences, and in public policy forums domestic and abroad, Notre Dame neuroscience and behavior majors are exploring and deepening their passion for the study of the human nervous system. Last year, three members of the Class of 2019 used grants they received through the Glynn Family Honors Program to conduct research on meditation and neglected children, measuring stress response, and rethinking justice. Through one discipline, they were able to see a variety of ways in which a firmer grasp of human thinking, affect, and behavior can serve as a force of good in the world.
Laura Miller-Graff, an assistant professor of psychology and peace studies, along with co-principal investigator Kathryn Howell of the University of Memphis and a team of Notre Dame faculty members, will evaluate the intervention program through a randomized, controlled trial involving more than 200 women and their infants.
When Joseph Weiler was 8, he sustained his first concussion — and he's wanted to study the complexities of the brain ever since. Now a neuroscience and behavior major in the College of Arts and Letters, Weiler's senior thesis oversaw the implementation of the Cogstate Cognigram — a test designed to track early cognitive symptoms of concussions — in Notre Dame’s Baraka Bouts women’s boxing competition for the last two years.
Holly Levin-Aspenson discusses why it's important to improve how psychologists describe and measure mental health problems and what makes Notre Dame's Ph.D. in psychology program distinctive.
For junior Alice Felker, it only took eight weeks for a service experience to turn into years of research and volunteer efforts for people with disabilities. The summer after her freshman year, Felker participated in the Summer Service Learning Program, an eight-week service opportunity within marginalized populations run by Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns. The following summer, the psychology and applied and computational mathematics and statistics major conducted a study to examine the daytime programs offered for people with disabilities.
Notre Dame senior Gregory Serapio-García has been selected for the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship to pursue a full-time postgraduate degree at the University of Cambridge in England. A psychology major and Idzik Computing and Digital Technologies Program minor in the College of Arts and Letters, Serapio-García is one of 34 Gates Cambridge Scholars representing 37 colleges or universities across the U.S.
The Graduate School at the University of Notre Dame recently received the first wave of findings from its involvement in the PhD Career Pathways Project facilitated by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS…
Each year, grants from the Discovery Fund are awarded to researchers who propose novel technologies and diagnostics that can improve human and environmental health.
Much human behavior is stimulus-free. While plants and many non-human animals respond reflexively to their present environment, our own actions are mediated by our ability to represent how the world has been and how it could be, and how we might alter it to achieve our goals. Philosophers who have explored the evolutionary pressures giving rise to representational cognition, such as Godfrey-Smith (1996) and Sterelny (2003), have emphasized the role played by environmental complexity. Armin Schulz suggests that an important part of this evolutionary story has been overlooked. He argues that representationally mediated behavior is adaptive because it is more cognitively efficient than reflex-driven behavior, under certain conditions.…
The brain, one of the largest and most complex organs in the human body, is about the size of a grapefruit. Yet it contains more than 100 billion nerves and numerous folds and creases. It is the “folds” of the brain, called gyri and sulci, that were the focus of a University of Notre Dame-led study recently published in Physical Review Letters…
Zhiyong Zhang, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, has been awarded the 2018 Cattell Early Career Research Award from the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology.