Department of Psychology | News

Kristen Friday named valedictorian; Miguel Coste selected salutatorian

2023-05-05T14:30:00-04:00

Kristen Friday of Pittsburgh has been named valedictorian and Miguel Coste from Tampa has been selected salutatorian of the 2023 University of Notre Dame graduating class.

The 178th University Commencement Ceremony will be held May 21 (Sunday) in Notre Dame Stadium for graduates and guests. During the ceremony, Friday will present the valedictory address, and as the salutatorian, Coste will offer the invocation.

Friday is a computer science and engineering major with a minor in engineering corporate practice in the College of Engineering where she has accumulated a 4.00 grade point average and has been a member of the Dean’s List each semester. During her time at Notre Dame, she was involved in a project funded by Ford

2023 Valedictorian

Motor Co., which focused on real-time notifications to enhance driver and pedestrian safety measures by assessing user intentions at road intersections. She played an integral role on the project collecting user data to train the machine learning model performance and in automating alerts for vehicles in high-traffic areas.

She completed several internships over the past four years, including as an associate automation engineer intern with Hitachi Rail STS, a software engineer intern at IBM in the Research Triangle in North Carolina and a software engineer intern with Microsoft Corp. in Seattle. She also worked as an undergraduate teaching assistant with computer science and engineering faculty Matthew Morrison teaching Data Structures and Peter Bui teaching both Programming Challenges and Systems Programming.

Outside of the classroom, Friday was co-founder of the Notre Dame Women in Computer Science club, where she served as co-president. Together with her co-president, she was driven to support women in technology majors by hosting career panels, mentorship programs and outreach events paired with Habitat for Humanity. Friday was a two-year member of the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society, and also received the college’s Steiner Award for academic excellence. In the spring of 2022, she studied abroad in London. Friday is also a self-described “avid member of Lewis Hall interhall sports” and was a four-year member of the University’s club tennis team. She also served as a volunteer at a ministry for the homeless in her hometown.

After graduation, Friday plans to work at Palantir Technologies as a software engineer in Washington, D.C. She hopes to continue building innovative technological solutions that will empower users, promote the greater good and improve the human experience.

Coste, a neuroscience and behavior major in the College of Arts and Letters, has compiled a 3.972 grade point average and has been a member of the Dean’s List every semester. A member of the Phi Beta Kappa liberal arts and sciences honor society, he was selected from nearly 900 national applicants in 2022 as one of the organization’s 20 recipients for the Key into Public Service Scholarship for his academic excellence, leadership and commitment to public service. He was also inducted into the Nu Rho Psi neuroscience national honor society.

2023 Salutatorian

In 2021, he worked as an undergraduate research assistant at MIT’s summer research program in biology, where he developed experiments in systems neuroscience. He also served as an undergraduate research assistant with sociology professor Mark Berends studying Indiana schools’ responses to COVID-19. He also spent a semester in Ireland at Trinity College Dublin.

Coste’s honors include being awarded a Gilman Scholarship in 2021 and being named a Notre Dame AnBryce Scholar and QuestBridge Scholar. He was on the advisory board and served as president of First Gen Careers, which is part of the Meruelo Family Center for Career Development. He served as president of 1stG ND and as a sophomore was head mentor of the University’s QuestBridge chapter. He is also a former member of the University’s cheer team, a University Relations intern involved with Cavanaugh Council and the President’s Circle and a member of the National Name Exchange since 2020.

After graduation, Coste will work for Epic Systems as a technical solutions engineer in Madison, Wisconsin. He hopes to work in the public health field to promote and protect the health of people and communities, particularly the marginalized.

As salutatorian, he will be prepared to deliver a valedictory address should the valedictorian be unable to do so.

The Notre Dame valedictorian and salutatorian selection process begins by identifying the top four students among those with the highest grade point averages in each college or school. Those students are then invited to complete an application that includes letters of recommendation from faculty members and a draft of their commencement speech. A selection committee, coordinated by the division of Undergraduate Education in the Provost’s Office, interviews finalists and chooses a valedictorian and salutatorian who are approved by University President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C.

Originally published by Sue Ryan at news.nd.edu on May 05, 2023.

Peggy Wang and NIH-funded research team to study how racial discrimination affects adolescent Asian Americans’ mental health

2022-10-14T11:00:00-04:00

Lijuan (Peggy) Wang

Hate crimes, discrimination, and harassment against Asian Americans in the United States have risen rapidly in recent years, and Notre Dame psychologist Lijuan (Peggy) Wang wants to know how that has impacted adolescents and what factors can be leveraged to protect and promote their mental health.

“Asian American parents and children are struggling with a deeply troubling new sociopolitical context, a context with unprecedented levels of anti-Asian hate and violence since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Wang, a professor in the Department of Psychology.

To lay the groundwork for building evidence-based and urgently needed interventions, Wang is part of a research team developing the first longitudinal study to fill research gaps and learn about how racial discrimination affects adolescent Asian Americans’ mental health.

Funded by a National Institutes of Health Research Project Grant (R01), the five-year research project — titled “Discrimination and racial socialization on Asian American parent and youth mental health” — will involve 350 Chinese American adolescents from the Boston area, as well as their Chinese heritage parent and a peer.

The research team will observe, survey, and interview participants and measure hair cortisol (a biomarker of chronic stress) to assess the effects of discrimination on mental health, including depression, anxiety, chronic stress, and the risk of suicide among the teens over three years.

In addition, the collaborative project will incorporate parent-adolescent and peer-adolescent discussion tasks to study how parents, peers, and social media racially socialize Asian American adolescents — that is, how they transmit information and beliefs, both implicit and explicit, about race and discrimination in the broader societal context.

The project will provide the unique opportunity for Chinese Americans families to talk about current topics that affect Asian Americans (e.g., racism) in a meaningful and positive way. Wang said the findings will be utilized in three ways: to identify common struggles of Chinese American adolescents and their parents; to develop interventions to address specific needs of the families; and to provide recommendations for prevention policies and programs to mitigate the detrimental mental health effects of discrimination.

“Asian American parents and children are struggling with a deeply troubling new sociopolitical context, a context with unprecedented levels of anti-Asian hate and violence since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.’”

As a quantitative psychologist, Wang will contribute to the study by developing, evaluating, and applying cutting-edge statistical models and research methodology in order to better understand the psychological processes involved. Notre Dame psychology Ph.D. students will contribute to the study by analyzing the longitudinal multi-method data using advanced quantitative methods.

“I am grateful that I can use my expertise to uncover psychological processes and help develop and evaluate intervention programs to improve the mental health of human beings,” Wang said.

The study team includes Cindy Liu, principal investigator, at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Tiffany Yip at Fordham University; Linda Charmaraman at Wellesley Centers for Women; and Hyeouk “Chris” Hahm at Boston University. Consultants are Shirley Yen at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center/Harvard Medical School, and Richard Lee at the University of Minnesota.

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on October 14, 2022.

NIH awards $4 million grant to psychologists researching suicide prevention

2022-10-04T11:30:00-04:00

University of Notre Dame psychologists Theodore Beauchaine and Kristin Valentino have received the Transformative Research Award from the National Institutes of Health to research two promising new interventions to reduce the risk of suicide among vulnerable youth.

Part of the NIH High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, the award supports individuals or teams proposing transformative projects that are inherently untested but have the potential to create major scientific breakthroughs by challenging existing paradigms.

“We are thrilled to receive the Transformative Research Award,” said Beauchaine, the William K. Warren Foundation Professor of Psychology and director of primary prevention at the Notre Dame Suicide Prevention Initiative. “The traditional pipeline for new interventions is 12 years long, at best. This is an amazing opportunity to fast-track these methods and technologies in order to reach far more adolescents at far lower cost — and hopefully save lives.”

The $4 million grant — the largest federal award ever received by Arts & letters faculty — will support a five-year project, “Leveraging Noninvasive Transcutaneous Vagus Nerve Stimulation and Smartphone Technology to Reduce Suicidal Behaviors and Suicide Among Highly Vulnerable Adolescents.” It is led by Beauchaine and Valentino, the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families Professor of Psychology, as well as Arielle Sheftall of the University of Rochester. Brooke Ammerman and Ross Jacobucci, both assistant professors of psychology at Notre Dame, are also core contributors.

Over the past two decades, suicide rates have increased by nearly 35 percent in the U.S., and the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated mental health issues. Although these upward trends affect nearly all demographic groups, adolescents in both rural and urban settings are particularly vulnerable — and more difficult to reach through traditional therapies.

“Most current primary prevention programs are intensive, expensive, and delivered by highly trained mental health providers who are in short supply,” Beauchaine said. “Traditional face-to-face therapy is also unavailable to many who live in underserved communities and is disliked by adolescents, who much prefer digital delivery on their devices.”

“It is very consistent with the Catholic mission of Notre Dame to engage in outreach to families, to people in distress, to poor communities, and to improve quality of life for those communities. ... When you see the extent of pain people are in — including family members and other survivors — it's hard not to want to do something about that.”

With that in mind, the team seeks to “meet adolescents where they are” in this research, with two low-cost, noninvasive, scalable interventions: transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation to target emotion dysregulation and a peer-support smartphone app to combat social isolation.

Beauchaine and Valentino plan to enroll more than 200 adolescents (ages 13-17) from South Bend and surrounding communities who then will be assigned randomly to one of four groups — using one of the two new interventions, a combination of both, or access to traditional treatment.

Teens who receive vagus nerve stimulation will use a handheld/pocket device for 30 minutes each day that targets the nerve with a mild electrical current through a special earbud. Powered by a smartphone app, the device called Xen plays music of their choice at the same time.

Vagus nerve stimulation is shown to be effective in treating depression and improving emotion regulation in numerous studies, Beauchaine noted. And in one recent study of adults, the treatment was associated with lower rates of suicide five years later.

The second intervention involves a custom smartphone app that Ammerman is working to develop with support from the Notre Dame College of Engineering. The app will allow participants who are experiencing similar struggles to connect via text and phone to reduce social isolation.

“This is part of the high-risk, high-reward aspect of this research,” Beauchaine said. “Traditionally, professionals have tried to avoid connecting people who are struggling out of fear of contagion. But it turns out from the scientific literature that the risk of contagion is overstated. We will be in daily contact with all of our participants via phone and will also be monitoring closely for that.”

Often, traditional treatment for suicidal behavior is also not begun until there is significant distress. By identifying children and adolescents who are at high risk for self-injury and suicide attempts and addressing these risk factors before they become overwhelming, Beauchaine hopes to significantly reduce suicidal behaviors later on.

Beauchaine joined the Notre Dame faculty last year and said the College of Arts and Letters and Department of Psychology have offered tremendous support for his research, which he sees as integral to the University’s mission.

“It is very consistent with the Catholic mission of Notre Dame to engage in outreach to families, to people in distress, to poor communities, and to improve quality of life for those communities,” he said. “As many people have been touched by suicide as have been touched by cancer, according to national data. When you see the extent of pain people are in — including family members and other survivors — it's hard not to want to do something about that.”

Originally published at news.nd.edu.

Notre Dame philosopher and psychologist team up to study whether intellectual humility is a virtue — and if it’s helpful or harmful to the marginalized and oppressed

2022-09-21T11:55:00-04:00

Laura Callahan

Intellectual humility — being free to think and listen without being concerned with the need to “be right” — could be an antidote for some pressing personal and societal problems.

An interdisciplinary group of philosophers and psychologists, supported by a John Templeton Foundation grant, are hoping to identify how the characteristic can be used by individuals to improve their lives and how it can be more inclusive.

“Intellectual arrogance and vanity can stifle conversation, learning, and discovery, which contributes to polarization, as well as ignorance about the lived experiences of other people,” said Laura Callahan, a Notre Dame assistant professor of philosophy and the principal investigator on the project. “We can’t listen and learn and come to know the truth about important subjects if we're caught up in defending our own views just because they’re ours.”

It might seem like a no-brainer that everyone could benefit from more intellectual humility (IH), but Callahan said that judgment might not take into account the variety of contexts — including oppression and marginalization — that shape people's lives.

While many people are overly confident and attached to their beliefs, Callahan said, others — including those conditioned to distrust their experiences and abilities — are underconfident. And some may be in situations where they have to be super confident, even dogmatic, to make themselves heard.

Thus, she said, it’s important to consider IH from the perspective of people routinely bombarded with messages that they’re ignorant or untrustworthy. That could include an abuse survivor who’s been gaslit about their memory of a troubling situation. Or a student from a marginalized group who’s been told their ideas aren’t worthy. Or a Black patient whose obstetrician doesn’t believe their description of troublesome symptoms.

Dan Lapsley

These types of contexts piqued Callahan’s interest in IH and oppression. To learn more about the topic, she teamed up with Daniel Lapsley, the ACE College Professor of Psychology and director of the Moral and Adolescent Psychology Lab, to form an interdisciplinary working group as part of the two-year project.

Collaborating with experts in psychology is fitting, she said. Philosophers think critically about what’s morally and epistemically valuable about IH across contexts, and psychologists examine how IH manifests and develops in people’s lives, which traits accompany it, and what life experiences it predicts.

“We can’t run empirical studies well without knowing what’s worth calling intellectual humility,” she said. “But neither can we theorize productively from the armchair about what traits are valuable for people to have, especially when we want to think about people in contexts of oppression and marginalization who may not closely resemble the philosopher sitting in said armchair.”

Callahan will read, write, and present ideas to philosophers, and the interdisciplinary working group will meet virtually biweekly and convene for a summer 2023 workshop in Chicago. Callahan and Lapsley have brought on several psychologists and philosophers from other universities to provide insight, and fellows in residence at the Center for Philosophy of Religion will consider questions related to intellectual humility and oppression in 2023-24. Additional leading thinkers from epistemology and ethics will be invited to a capstone conference in 2024.

Callahan, who is also associate director of the center and an affiliated faculty member with the Gender Studies Program, said one project goal is to develop and inspire new definitions, or accounts, of intellectual humility, including those that are sensitive to experiences of oppressed and marginalized people.

“Intellectual arrogance and vanity can stifle conversation, learning, and discovery, which contributes to polarization, as well as ignorance about the lived experiences of other people. We can’t listen and learn and come to know the truth about important subjects if we're caught up in defending our own views just because they’re ours.”

She described humility and IH as disputed “virtues” — or desirable behaviors that indicate high moral standards. Aristotle and Friedrich Nietzsche didn’t even think they were virtues, but Jesus Christ and Iris Murdoch thought they were central to the good life.

A significant controversy, she said, is whether calling these traits “virtues” is just a way for the powerful to continue to subjugate the oppressed.

“I am really interested in whether you can celebrate humility as a central virtue for all people in a way that helps ameliorate, rather than exacerbate, oppression and marginalization.”

In the near term, the project will encourage participating philosophers and psychologists to incorporate relevant readings and discussion topics into their graduate and undergraduate teaching. In the longer term, Callahan said new theories of IH could be applied in the social sciences through measurement and the development of interventions or pedagogical techniques.

Increasing IH, ultimately, could have significant ramifications for education and other efforts to improve public discourse.

“Hopefully,” she said, “understanding intellectual humility better and more sensitively will enable students to be more intellectually humble, in productive ways.”

Originally published by Beth Staples at al.nd.edu on September 21, 2022.

Psychologist Darcia Narvaez named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

2022-01-27T08:50:00-05:00

Darcia Narvaez

Darcia Narvaez, a Notre Dame professor emerita in the Department of Psychology, has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the largest international body of professional scientists in the world and publisher of the prestigious journal Science.

Narvaez is being honored for her distinguished contributions illuminating typical and atypical development in terms of well-being, morality and sustainable wisdom. Narvaez examines how early life experience — the “evolved nest” — influences moral functioning and well-being in children and adults. She integrates evolutionary, anthropological, neurobiological, clinical, developmental and education sciences in her work.

The election of AAAS fellows is an honor bestowed upon members by their peers. Two other Notre Dame faculty were also named fellows this year — Patricia L. Clark, the Rev. John Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C., Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, associate vice president for research, and director of the Biophysics Instrumentation Core Facility; and Michael Pfrender, professor of evolutionary and ecological genomics and director of the Genomics and Bioinformatics Core Facility.

Narvaez, Clark, and Pfrender join the 36 other Notre Dame faculty members who are current AAAS fellows.

Previous honors for Narvaez include winning the William James Book Award from the American Psychological Association and the inaugural Expanded Reason Award for research for her book Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture, and Wisdom. In 2008, she was named a fellow of the American Psychological Association, and in 2016, she was named a fellow of the American Educational Research Association.

“I am so grateful to Notre Dame’s interdisciplinary collegiality, its inspiring faculty and ISLA’s funding for supporting me on this journey of revelation and accomplishment. As a social scientist, it’s a thrill for my transdisciplinary research to be recognized by AAAS.”

For the first portion of her career, Narvaez said, she investigated moral psychology and moral development in typical ways — through studying reason, cognition, and education. But several years ago, through cross-disciplinary faculty reading groups sponsored by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts that included philosophers, biologists, and anthropologists, she grew deeply interested in evolutionary issues. As she read deeper into neuro- and clinical sciences, she began to see all sorts of connections that sparked further research.

“I realized that all these fields bore on moral development. I was awakened to the fact that human beings are a particular species with particular needs that, especially in early life, need to be fulfilled in order to construct an individual’s sociality and compassionate morality,” she said. “The key insight was realizing that our species’ evolved nest is vital for fostering our cooperative human nature. When the evolved nest is degraded, as it is in industrialized countries, it can impair capacities for cooperation and compassion because early stress is toxic to species-typical neurobiological function.”

Her empirical, theoretical, and applied research now focuses on the kinds of characteristics notable in communities that provide the evolved nest to children from conception, societies that demonstrate wellbeing, heart-minded morality, and communal imagination.

“I am so grateful to Notre Dame’s interdisciplinary collegiality, its inspiring faculty and ISLA’s funding for supporting me on this journey of revelation and accomplishment,” she said. “As a social scientist, it’s a thrill for my transdisciplinary research to be recognized by AAAS.”

Originally published by Josh Weinhold at al.nd.edu on January 26, 2022.

Psychologist's study finds supportive early childhood environments can help decrease effects of trauma

2022-01-24T15:45:00-05:00

Darcia Narvaez and Mary Tarsha

Researchers know that experiencing a high number of adverse events in childhood correlates with worse health outcomes in adulthood. These studies have led to an emphasis on trauma-informed practice in schools and workplaces in an attempt to mitigate the harm of early adversity.

At the other end of the spectrum, focusing on wellness, Darcia Narvaez, emerita professor of psychology at the University of Notre Dame, has helped identify humanity’s baseline for childhood care. She has developed the breakthrough concept of the evolved nest (or evolved developmental niche; EDN). EDN represents common practices for our species over its 6-million-year history that bear on child development, child raising and adult behavior.

In a first-of-its-kind study conducted by Narvaez and doctoral student Mary Tarsha and published in the journal Anxiety, Stress and Coping, results show that positive childhood experiences can help buffer the effects of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on physiological health in adult women.

Narvaez and colleagues have been measuring EDN experience in children and adults to find out its relation to well-being, sociality and morality. The adult measure, EDN-history, is a self-reported measure of the adult’s perception of their childhood experiences — e.g., how responsive their relationships were and how much free play, affectionate touch, family togetherness and positive climate they experienced. The measure also asks about corporal punishment and negative home climate, which are reverse scored. The more positive aspects and fewer negative, the higher the EDN-history score will be.

After study participants self-reported on their EDN and ACE histories, Narvaez and Tarsha measured the women’s physiological regulation by monitoring vagus nerve functioning. The vagus nerve is a central component of the nervous system and manages many important bodily functions including digestion, respiration and heart rate. It also plays an important role in healthy functioning, including social functioning, with its impairment a sign of psychopathology.

Vagal tone (or vagal activity) was measured during relaxing tasks — e.g., watching a serene video with butterflies — and during a more stressful task — putting together puzzles while being timed.

“Vagal tone is a measure of the heartbeat intervals correlated with respiratory cycles or spontaneous breathing,” said Narvaez. “Vagal tone is highly influenced by early life experience, with stable responsive care supporting its healthy development.”

Narvaez and Tarsha were able to show that during both relaxing and stressful conditions, EDN-history scores buffered the negative effects of ACE scores, helping women adapt to the changing contexts in more resilient ways. During the stressful condition when women needed to ramp up their stress response to focus on a challenging task, greater EDN-history helped facilitate this in a way that was not excessive — so they were not overly stressed. Then, when women needed to relax and calm down during non-stressful conditions, strong EDN-history also helped them adapt and self-calm.

“Physiological adaptability is a key component of physical and psychological well-being and resilience,” said Tarsha, who is a doctoral candidate in psychology and peace studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. “Experiences of EDN in childhood may not only buffer effects of adversity but also support the physiological building blocks of health and resilience.”

EDN is a way of not only promoting the positive — what children need to develop well — but also reducing the negative physiological effects of adversity and trauma, the researchers noted. It is also important because it provides an insight into a possible key path to developing adult resilience.

“You need a healthy vagal tone to allow you to get close to someone. And, if the vagus nerve is not functioning well, you aren’t going to demonstrate as much compassion,” Narvaez said. “Vagal tone has both direct and indirect effects on morality.”

Tarsha said there is a growing awareness of the impact of trauma in the peacebuilding field, but there is a massive gap in understanding how positive experiences of EDN can support wellness.

“It’s important for policymakers and peacebuilders to understand EDN, because they are wrestling with how to help families, especially those in conflict zones,” Tarsha said.

This study is part of a series of studies on the long-term effects of EDN experiences and vagal regulation. In another study in the series, 6-year-old children who experienced more self-directed play in the prior week, as reported by their mothers, had better vagal regulation.

“These findings are adding to converging evidence indicating that the evolved nest components are important for healthy development,” Narvaez and Tarsha wrote. “Human psychology research should encompass an evolutionary understanding of our species’ development by examining the evolved components that support healthy development.”

Narvaez and colleagues from other universities recently authored a separate paper published in American Psychologist that further underscores the importance of EDN. They proposed a developmental evolutionary psychology theory that orients to dynamic development in the present, rather than to the biological determinism of genetic inheritance.

“Every individual constructs their personhood through real-time engagement with the world, so it matters what kind of relational experiences the individual has,” they wrote. Taking early life experience seriously means attending to EDN, which perhaps is the best way to promote health and resilience for the long term.

Originally published by Colleen Sharkey at news.nd.edu on January 18, 2022.

Video: Sacred Places of Notre Dame- Laura Larrian

2021-12-17T08:00:00-05:00

The Alumni Association is featuring its Advent campaign - Sacred Places of Notre Dame. This year they are featuring two students from the Psychology Department, Annika Knuth and Laura Larrian.

Please watch Laura Larrian's video:

https://youtu.be/NqfvrAVRgrU…

Video: Sacred Places of Notre Dame- Annika Knuth

2021-12-14T13:00:00-05:00

The Alumni Association is featuring its Advent campaign - Sacred Places of Notre Dame. This year they are featuring two students from the Psychology Department, Annika Knuth and Laura Larrian.

Please watch Annika Knuth's video:

https://youtu.be/aJqbLj3XGbY

…

Video: Notre Dame psychologist Theodore Beauchaine on using research and technology to prevent suicide

2021-11-10T09:00:00-05:00

“If one has heart disease, you don't wait until they have a first heart attack to intervene. It turns out that suicide prevention is similar to that,” said Theodore Beauchaine, the William K. Warren Foundation Professor of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame.

Beauchaine is co-director of the Suicide Prevention Initiative—Research, Intervention, & Training (SPIRIT), located off campus at the Department of Psychology Clinical Studies Building. Along with co-director Brooke Ammerman, Beauchaine is helping to teach children and adolescents in the South Bend community to better regulate their emotions, with the goal of reducing risk factors for suicide. One promising tool he is researching is a pocket-sized music player with earbuds that stimulate the vagus nerve with a low amplitude electrical current.

“That current is taken up by the brain and it increases neural activity in brain regions that are associated with emotion dysregulation,” he said.

Technological innovations make it easier to reach poor urban and poor rural communities, which are hit hardest by suicide but lack the resources to travel to in-person mental health services.

As these methods continue to develop, Beauchaine is hopeful for how the field of suicide prevention will advance.

“There are things that we can't foresee that we'll know in ten years that we don't know now, and that's exciting,” Beauchaine said. “That keeps me coming to work every day.”

You can also watch this video on YouTube.

Originally published by Todd Boruff at al.nd.edu on November 10, 2021.

With NSF grant, interdisciplinary Notre Dame team aims to develop national model for community-university partnerships that can help revive Rust Belt cities

2021-10-21T10:00:00-04:00

Jay Brockman

Danielle Wood

Dan Lapsley

An interdisciplinary team of Notre Dame faculty is leading an effort with institutions in Ohio and Kentucky to replicate an experiential learning model for attracting and retaining diverse STEM workforces in Rust Belt cities through university-community partnerships that strengthen quality of life.

The three-year project, Replication of a Community-Engaged Educational Ecosystem Model in Rust Belt Cities, is supported by more than $2.5 million from the National Science Foundation’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program, $1.1 million of which is directed to Notre Dame.

Led by the College of Engineering’s Center for Civic Innovation — which uses technology and methods to address pressing issues in the South Bend/Elkhart area — the project also involves engineering and Department of Psychology faculty in the effort to understand how CCI’s model for community improvement projects functions in other cities under varying circumstances.

In the short-term, such research and collaboration projects seek to make life better for residents by addressing key issues of concern. In the long-term, the projects can foster strong connections between the students involved in them and the Rust Belt cities where they take place, spurring undergraduates to consider making their professional and personal homes there.

In both its short-term aim to improve the community and its long-term goal of building strong connections between students and Rust Belt cities, the effort strongly aligns with Catholic social teaching on seeking the common good for communities, Wood said.

“Rust Belt cities are the focus because they often struggle more with disinvestment — in neighborhoods, in people,” said Danielle Wood, CCI’s associate director for research and the principal investigator on the grant. “As a Catholic university, we are called to be in solidarity and participate in our community — to be good neighbors. And neighbors take care of each other. They work together. They look out for each other.”

“As a Catholic university, we are called to be in solidarity and participate in our community — to be good neighbors. And neighbors take care of each other. They work together. They look out for each other.”

‘We need to join forces more’

Alisa Zornig Gura

Kerry Meyers

The interdisciplinary research team includes Wood; Jay Brockman, director of the CCI and a Department of Computer Science and Engineering faculty member; Kerry Meyers, the College of Engineering’s assistant dean for student development; CCI managing director Alisa Zornig Gura; and Daniel Lapsley, the ACE Collegiate Professor in the College of Arts & Letters’ Department of Psychology.

After their collaborative learning model of community engagement is applied by researchers at Youngstown State University and the University of Louisville and additional South Bend/Elkhart projects are implemented, Notre Dame will share a replicable model that provides STEM-based experiential learning opportunities to address an array of public challenges such as access to healthcare, affordable housing, and environmental sustainability.

“There are a lot of people who want to see this. There are a lot of people on this campus that engage heavily with the community, and not just through service,” Brockman said. “Whatever their discipline is, they bring their intellectual assets to do it. And we need to join forces more to have the most impact we can have.”

The Notre Dame team aims to identify the best ways to create a network of community partners to identify projects; recruit students and train them in project management, team leadership, and design thinking; and promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Lapsley, a developmental psychologist, will study differences in student disposition and their sense of connection to the place in which they work and study — and how that differs based on variables in each location.

All of the civic partnerships in the grant will prioritize listening to the community before taking action and fostering spaces where students of all social and economic backgrounds are welcome. Potential initiatives could include environmental remediation projects, connecting public school students to STEM programs, or partnering with the City of South Bend on creating energy-efficient and affordable housing.

High schools and colleges throughout the South Bend, Youngstown, and Louisville regions will participate in the projects, exposing students to their academic peers and community members they wouldn’t otherwise meet — and, hopefully, forming connections that prompt them to consider staying in the Rust Belt.

“Creating that collaborative learning environment where educating youth and making positive community change is part of our ethos,” said Wood, who is also project director of the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative (ND-GAIN). “It’s been happening, but more of a culture shift is needed.”

“There are far more important connections between the College of Engineering and the College of Arts and Letters than people realize.”

‘This flows from our faith’

So how does a psychologist get involved in a civic-minded effort led by engineers?

Two years ago, Lapsley went to a presentation Wood and Brockman were giving about their community work and partnerships — and what they were saying sounded very familiar.

“I was really struck by the language they were using — ‘community assets’ and the ‘whole-systems perspective.’ The language they were using had deep resonance in the language developmental psychologists use,” he said. “I began to see connections between what they’re doing and what we do in developmental psychology.”

Wood and Lapsley met the next day to continue the conversation, and the synergy was clear. University-led community partnerships provide students the autonomy they need to develop ideas on community-identified issues while also generating a sense of attachment to the communities they serve.

In psychology buzzwords, it gives the students “voice” and “choice.” A greater sense of purpose emerges, and students gain a heightened civic identity that means they’re more likely to vote and engage with their community.

“The work Dan does is highly relevant here,” Brockman said. “There are far more important connections between the College of Engineering and the College of Arts and Letters than people realize.”

Beyond the psychological component, the underlying mission resonates with Lapsley — as a Pittsburgh native and son of a steel worker, he knows what it’s like for a city to lose its industry and redefine itself through other careers and research in medicine and technology.

And the energy at the intersection of expertise, mission, and service makes Notre Dame the perfect place to be advancing such efforts.

“We should be using our science, our engineering, our theology, and philosophy to help people so they have the context to flourish, for regions to contribute to the well-being of individuals,” Lapsley said. “This flows from our faith, alleviates distress, and makes lives better for people.”

Originally published by Pat Milhizer at al.nd.edu on October 21, 2021.

Mark Cummings earns prestigious Bowlby-Ainsworth Award

2021-10-11T12:00:00-04:00

E. Mark Cummings

Mark Cummings, the William J. Shaw Center for Children and Families Professor of Psychology, is the 2021 recipient of the Bowlby-Ainsworth Award, bestowed by the New York Attachment Consortium. The citation reads: “For innovative research on the effects of early exposure to family violence and for conceptualizing and measuring the continuum of Emotional Security.”

For 20 years, the Bowlby-Ainsworth Award has recognized senior scholars who exemplify the standards of scholarship, collegiality and service that John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth shared, taught, and valued. Selections are made by the Awards Committee of the Center For Mental Health Promotion and The New York Attachment Consortium, in consultation with previous recipients and
distinguished international colleagues.

Previous recipients include Robert Hinde (Cambridge), James & Joyce Robertson (Tavistock Clinic), L. Alan Sroufe (Minnesota), Mary B. Main (Berkeley), Marinus van IJzendoorn (Leiden), Jay Belsky (UC Davis), and Peter Fonagy (University College London), among others.

Mark Cummings recently sat down for an interview with Dan Lapsley, the ACE Collegiate Professor of Psychology, on the occasion of his receiving the 2021 Bowlby-Ainsworth Award

Congratulations on receiving this prestigious award. What was your reaction when you first learned of it?

In a bit of understatement, I am extremely pleased and honored to have received the Bowlby-Ainsworth award. Given that my work with Patrick Davies on Emotional Security Theory was inspired from the beginning as an extension of Bowlby and Ainsworth’s Attachment Theory to a family-wide (and later community) conceptualization of processes (especially emotional security) underlying children’s adjustment and development, this award is particularly affirming and meaningful.

What led you to take up this work?

My career choice in developmental psychology can be traced back to my decision as a sophomore premed major at Johns Hopkins University to take Mary Ainsworth’s course, which was based primarily on Bowlby’s new book on Attachment (which was only available in draft form at the time). Inspired by her course, I rethought my major and joined her lab as an undergrad RA.

What was your experience as an RA in Mary Ainsworth’s lab?

Our regular research meetings took place in a non-descript conference room in Ames Hall (the Psychology Department) but included undergrads (Everett Waters, Mark Greenberg) and grads (Mary Main, Inge Bretherton) who would later make significant contributions to the field but were, of course, unknown at the time. I eagerly volunteered to be the stranger in the newly developed Strange Situation methodology, but was, mysteriously, rejected for that role.

Yes, that is a complete mystery! So you were there at the beginning of the Strange Situation assessment of attachment. How was it being received in the field?

There was a lot of pushback against Attachment Theory at the time. My advisor, Wendell Jeffrey, who was Editor of Child Development, the most prestigious journal in Developmental Psychology, frequently asked me questions to help him make sense of this strange new theory.

So you joined Wendell Jeffrey at UCLA for your doctoral work, and then went on to NIH? [Editor’s Note. Check out the 7th paragraph in the Wendell Jeffrey link]

Yes, I did my doctoral work at UCLA in Developmental Psychology, with a minor in Experimental Psychopathology, with the latter supported by coursework in UCLA’s prominent Clinical Psychology program. After UCLA, I took a position at NIH’s intramural research facility in Bethesda, Maryland, in the Laboratory of Developmental Psychology.

Did you stay in touch with Mary Ainsworth?

I certainly kept in touch with Mary Ainsworth over the years, and I also reached out to John Bowlby. Bowlby wrote me a hand-written letter expressing admiration for my work (which I subsequently lost!). In the context of her new position at the University of Virginia, I visited her in Charlottesville several times, once joined by her grad student, Jude Cassidy and another time by Mary Main.

That must have been exciting getting a handwritten note from John Bowlby. Did you ever meet him?

Yes I did. While I was at NIH I was invited to be a keynote speaker in in a 2-week long celebration of Bowlby’s 80th Birthday in London hosted by the Tavistock Clinic, which is where Bowlby worked for many years. I appreciated the opportunity to visit Bowlby’s home and meet his family and I had dinner with Bowlby and a couple of other colleagues.

At dinner Bowlby noted that for many years he was not accepted in either the Melanie Klein or Anna Freud camps at Tavistock because he allowed (heretically!) for the role of experience in development. My keynote address was in front of literally hundreds, in which I spoke about attachment as a lifespan construct, including our recent work on the importance of attachment of grandparents to their adult children.

Those must have been heady days in the evolution of attachment theory, and you were there on the scene.

It was very exciting for sure. Over a period of nearly a decade I participated in meetings on attachment in the preschool years, organized by Mark Greenberg and supported by the MacArthur Foundation, culminating in a book [Editor’s Note: Attachment in the Preschool Years] that I co-edited with Greenberg and Dante Cicchetti. The discussions in these meetings were lively and groundbreaking in many ways, including, among others, Ainsworth, Main, Cassidy, Jay Belsky, as well as Greenberg, Cicchetti, and me, with Bowlby attending several meetings.

Thank you Mark for sharing your reminiscences about Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby, and congratulations on this well-deserved award.

Thank you, this award is especially important to me and affirming for many reasons.

In research and community outreach, psychology Ph.D. student strives for science to influence policy and make an impact on the public

2021-09-27T09:20:00-04:00

Morgan Widhalm Munsen

Morgan Widhalm Munsen knows that effective communication is key for scientific research to have real life implications.

So, in addition to conducting significant research of her own as a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology, Munsen also pursues community-based projects that make science more accessible and understandable to the general public.

“It’s not like you can do research and then suddenly expect it to be meaningful to people,” Munsen said. “Which is why I think it’s so important for scientists and researchers to tell stories about their research and help to make it as relevant as possible to people.”

That mentality was evident over winter break when Munsen and Cara Ocobock, a Notre Dame assistant professor of anthropology, teamed up to deliver science in an engaging way to students in South Bend.

At St. Adalbert Catholic School, 1st through 8th graders received supplies and science kits with a lab manual designed by Ocobock. For each of the 28 experiments outlined by the manual, a profile of a diverse female scientist was also provided.

The project received both a community impact grant from the Center for Social Concerns as well as a grant focused on diversity and inclusion within science policy from the National Science Policy Network.

The kits served as both an at-home activity to do with family members and as a resource for teachers in the classroom or to aid in navigating the challenges of virtual education.

“It’s just this really great holistic kit to engage students in a way that’s hands-on and fun but also really meaningful in allowing them to identify as a scientist,” Munsen said. “It’s important not just for young girls but also for young boys to see that women can also be scientists.

“Notre Dame is so generous with grants for situations like this — and we have a responsibility as scientists and as humans to leave the world a better place and to utilize what resources we have to serve the community.”

“I’m driven by this desire to understand how the brain, a physical machine, allows us to be humans who do everything from making decisions to having memories to understanding each other and trying to love each other. Through understanding how our brain works, we can hopefully become better at being humans if we understand ourselves and others better.”

Pursuing truth

Munsen, who graduated from Notre Dame in 2017 with a bachelor's degree in neuroscience and behavior, focuses her doctoral work on cognitive neuroscience and has done research on both working memory and long-term memory.

Her current project with her advisor, assistant professor Joshua Koen, looks at interference in human memory, or how the human brain can make sense of and distinctly encode information or experiences that are very similar.

Munsen organizes the Michiana Science Cafe, an event series that fosters casual conversations amongst the public on scientific topics.

“I’m driven by this desire to understand how the brain, a physical machine, allows us to be humans who do everything from making decisions to having memories to understanding each other and trying to love each other,” Munsen said. “Through understanding how our brain works, we can hopefully become better at being humans if we understand ourselves and others better.”

Munsen is currently developing her dissertation proposal, which will examine how confirmation bias affects memory.

She plans to investigate how initial biases or prejudgements can affect the way one interprets and remembers subsequent information by looking at a court case scenario where an initial, biased description of a defendant is given before presenting participants with ambiguous facts of the case.

“My dissertation is part of my more general interest in how we approach and evaluate information, especially in the realm of discussion and trying to make sense of our own political or moral or ethical beliefs — because if we are immediately discounting certain information, we are not allowing ourselves to pursue the truth,” she said.

Pursuing policy

Munsen is also working toward the advanced quantitative social science graduate minor to enhance her technical skills.

Munsen presenting her research on interference in human memory encoding to policymakers as part of the Science Communication Day at the Indiana Statehouse.

“I’ve had so many great professors within the quantitative department that have an incredible ability to teach what can be a fairly intimidating subject,” Munsen said. “The minor enriches all the areas within cognition or developmental or clinical psychology. All of us benefit from that incredible technical knowledge base that we have.”

After Notre Dame, Munsen hopes to work in science policy or science communication. While she enjoys conducting research, Munsen is dedicated to providing a bridge between the world of academia and policy-making.

“It’s been so great to know that my advisor and the entire department supports my work in things like science policy and community engagement,” Munsen said. “It’s allowed me to really explore my interests and hopefully build up a good resume to pursue jobs related to policy.”

Originally published by Sophia Lauber at al.nd.edu on September 21, 2021.

Website, film developed by psychologist and Ph.D. student encourage parenting for peaceableness

2021-08-10T09:00:00-04:00

In less than six minutes, the new film “Breaking the Cycle” invites caregivers, parents, policymakers, and anyone concerned with child development to adopt more collaborative and peace-inducing strategies for child rearing. The new film, a companion to the website EvolvedNest.org, grew out of groundbreaking research by Darcia Narvaez, Kroc Institute faculty fellow and professor emerita of psychology, with support from current peace studies and psychology Ph.D. student Mary Tarsha.

Narvaez’s research and the new film contrasts two ways that society can function: through a “Cycle of Competitive Detachment” where children’s basic needs are not met, undermining their development at every level, leading to adults who are detached or distracted from children (the current reality in many economically-wealthy countries around the world) vs. a “Cycle of Cooperative Companionship” where children’s basic needs are met, children flourish and grow into healthier and more peaceable adults. Currently the U.S. ranks 41st out of 41 developed countries for child and adult well-being, and Narvaez and Tarsha argue that current patterns for child-rearing are largely to blame.

“As I conducted my research, it was shocking to find out about 75 million years of social mammal nesting, humanity’s millions-year-old evolved nest, and how we violate evolution’s lessons routinely, in the United States especially,” Narvaez said.

Drawing on research on the ways peaceable cultures throughout human existence have raised children, Narvaez developed the concept of the Evolved Nest, a system focused on meeting the needs of babies and young children rather than minimizing them. The system includes nine components ranging from creating soothing environments for children in the womb to on-request breastfeeding to providing a welcoming social climate and more.

“The nest is about fulfillment of needs so that the child can thrive, as well as the family and community around them,” Tarsha said. “It’s not just meeting needs, but fulfilling them in abundance.”

As Narvaez continued her research on neurobiology and how it is shaped in childhood, she grew frustrated with the inability to reach broader audiences through traditional academic channels, and began to blog at Psychology Today. From there, she connected to an editor at Kindred Media who helped her to create the Evolved Nest website to serve as a hub for popular articles, podcasts, videos and more.

The creation of the film is the next step in spreading the message further. The film is available in both English and Spanish, and sub-titles are available in Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Dutch, English, French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish.

“I really wanted to have a heart-centered way of presenting this information that triggers positive energy and imagination,” said Narvaez. “We’ve undermined our communal imaginations and underestimated how they can help us see what’s possible for humanity.”

Tarsha got involved with the project during her second year in the Kroc Institute’s Ph.D. program and was instrumental in hosting and creating short podcast series meant for popular audiences, including a series discussing Narvaez’s multi-award-winning book Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom and another series outlining each of the nine components of the Evolved Nest.

Tarsha immediately saw connections between Narvaez’s work and the peace studies field.

“It fills a really important gap within peace studies, which is creating a developmentally-informed understanding of the human person and society,” said Tarsha. “It’s also very important to safeguard against further colonialism. Having an awareness and understanding of the Nest helps reveal the lenses we Western scholars and practitioners sometimes carry with us and can prevent us from exporting these harmful developmental models to other communities around the world.”

Narvaez also sees this work as critical to raising healthier children and young adults who will contribute to building more peaceable and sustainable societies.

“The culture has forgotten about the Evolved Nest for building a human being who is cooperative, peaceful, and other oriented,” she said. “The Nest allows us to bring together scholarship from many different disciplines that contribute to understanding how a peaceful human being develops.”

Originally published at kroc.nd.edu.

Experiencing a new culture and majoring in psychology at Notre Dame inspires Korean native to pursue career in diversity, equity, and inclusion

2021-06-10T09:00:00-04:00

Senior Dain Kim had never been to Notre Dame before she arrived on campus for orientation. As a student at an international high school in Seoul, Korea, she knew she wanted to go to college in the U.S. — in a city, preferably, like one in New York or California.

Instead, she ended up in South Bend.

“One of my dreams was to go to a beautiful campus,” Kim said. “And after I got my acceptance letter, I felt like Notre Dame was the most welcoming place out of all the other colleges.”

As a psychology and statistics major with a minor in computing and digital technologies (CDT), Kim plans to pursue a career working to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion programs — helping others like herself who need to adapt quickly to entirely new cultures or circumstances.

Although she lived in Virginia for a couple of years as a child, Kim only grew familiar with American culture once she became a student at Notre Dame. She learned a lot through her friends and dormmates and joined several clubs on campus that helped her better understand her new environment.

“I never knew about football, about slang, American language, or anything like that,” she said. “But coming here really opened up chances for me to meet a lot of people from different cultures because I never grew up in an environment that was only Americans.”

A passion for research

That process of adaptation also inspired her to switch her major to psychology, as she realized she wanted to study a social science that would help her learn about people and their unique personalities, cultures, and origins.

After her psychology graduate student mentor suggested joining a research project, Kim started working in Jessica Payne’s Sleep, Stress and Memory Lab. There, she discovered her interest in statistics and data. She added a supplementary statistics major to explore those topics further, and later picked up a computing and digital technologies minor to enhance her tech skills.

“Working in a lab definitely gave me an idea that I'm interested in something related to research,” Kim said.

Over the past two years, Kim has explored how to bring her research interests and cultural background into the workplace through a pair of internships focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Kim interned as a healthcare consulting research assistant at Prometheus Federal Services, a software and IT government contractor, where she helped to integrate DEI concepts into their programming. This winter, she worked as a DEI recruiting intern at Mediaocean, an advertising and software company, where her duties included making job descriptions more inclusive.

“Psychology really helped me a lot because it involves a lot of thinking and research, and CDT was beneficial there because I had taken an ethical and professional issues course, which was what that work was all about,” she said. “I’m very interested in involving different types of people in a workforce and how that helps with doing more effective work as a company.”

“Notre Dame really emphasizes helping each other — while on campus, but also through the alumni network — and that really made an impact on me, because throughout college I was involved in mentoring and tutoring programs. That really helped me to build my path and has helped me succeed — that constant desire to support each other as a whole.”

Home away from home

Throughout these experiences, Kim has found ways to maintain a connection to Korean culture, especially through the Asian American Association and the Korean Student Association.

Around Korean holidays, Kim attends events hosted by Korean professors who share the language, games, and cuisine of Korea with students. In turn, she has shared aspects of that culture with her friends by being the multicultural commissioner in Farley Hall and a teaching assistant and peer tutor for students enrolled in Korean courses.

“Being a tutor really has helped me to meet a lot of people who are interested in Korean culture and the language,” she said. “And that also gave me a new perspective on how people come from different areas of the world and have an enthusiasm for our country.”

After graduation, Kim will start a full-time job as a sales development representative for Kudo, a New York-based startup that provides a multilingual web conferencing platform. She will be based in Seoul, Korea, working to connect with Korean clients with the product, which breaks language and cultural barriers for people around the world.

As she pursues a career exploring cultures by working in DEI, Kim will continue to utilize the collaborative skills she learned through exposure to different perspectives at Notre Dame.

“Notre Dame really emphasizes helping each other — while on campus, but also through the alumni network — and that really made an impact on me, because throughout college I was involved in mentoring and tutoring programs,” she said. “That really helped me to build my path and has helped me succeed — that constant desire to support each other as a whole.”

Originally published by Kate Flanagan at al.nd.edu on May 13, 2021.

Q&A with Claire Scott-Bacon, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology

2021-05-05T12:00:00-04:00

Claire Scott-Bacon

This Q&A is part of an ongoing series with Arts and Letters graduate students. Read more Q&As with graduate students and faculty members here.

Claire Scott-Bacon is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Psychology’s clinical program and was recently awarded a Distinguished Graduate Fellowship from the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. Her research focuses on issues related to the structure and assessment of criminal personality in clinical, forensic, and legal settings. She began attending college for the first time at 48 years old and received a bachelor of science degree and a bachelor of arts degree with honors from Florida International University.

What are your research interests?

My research interests focus on the expression and assessment of psychopathy and criminal behavior. This interest also includes the overlap of psychopathy with other disorders, like autism spectrum disorders, emotion regulation, and gender differences.

My masters project examined items on self-report psychopathic personality scales using item response theory (IRT) methods. IRT is a family of psychometric or statistical methods of assessing the ability of questions on personality assessment scales to accurately detect and explain latent traits (i.e., psychopathic traits) responses. My goal is to improve these assessment scales to enable the criminal justice system to make better decisions about a person’s competency to stand trial, sanity, sentencing outcome, and mental health treatment.

My dissertation project involves examining the size and specificity of psychopathic traits, characteristics, and behaviors in people with autism spectrum disorders. This involves examining a callous lack of emotion, emotional regulation, and intelligence in people with psychopathic personality and autism using latent trait modeling, factor analysis, and hierarchical regression models and methods of psychometric analysis. The aim of this study is to identify an autistic psychopath sub-type and to understand their level of criminal responsibility.

What inspired you to explore these topics?

I was inspired to do this research while working as an undergraduate intern at FIU Law School’s Death Penalty Clinic, under the supervision of Stephen Harper. My role included communicating with inmates on death row seeking re-evaluation of the evidence and testimony used against them.

While gathering documents and evidence, analysis of court transcripts, legal research, and assisting in the evaluation of requests for post-conviction assistance on a case-by-case basis, I observed a pattern of psychological and intellectual disabilities and disparities in the people on death row. With the high rate of wrongful convictions and criminalization of mental health-related crimes in the United States, I wanted to develop a deeper understanding of personality assessment tools and their accuracy when making decisions about sentencing.

“I observed a pattern of psychological and intellectual disabilities and disparities in the people on death row. With the high rate of wrongful convictions and criminalization of mental health-related crimes in the United States, I wanted to develop a deeper understanding of personality assessment tools and their accuracy when making decisions about sentencing.”

Why is this research especially important in the context of the criminal justice system?

Adults and juveniles with mental illness and intellectual difficulties are overrepresented in the U.S. criminal justice system. Various social factors including gender, intellect, and emotion regulation influence the expression of mental illness/disorders and externalizing behaviors. For example, the consequence of not understanding the overlap between the externalizing behaviors of people on the autism spectrum and the externalizing behaviors and traits of psychopathy may lead to adults and juveniles being incorrectly assessed as having antisocial personality disorders (as an adult) or oppositional defiant disorders (as a youth).

My research is particularly important and relevant today because improving outdated assessment tools may prevent people with ASD from receiving an invalid assessment of an antisocial disorder when being sentenced for a crime.

How did you choose Notre Dame?

In early 2016, I was introduced to Notre Dame’s graduate school Summer Research Opportunity Program at my undergraduate institution, during the application process for an undergraduate fellowship. After spending approximately three months at Notre Dame during the summer of 2016, I was lucky enough to take part in an SROP grant and fellowship writing workshop in 2017. As a result, I was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

I chose to attend Notre Dame because of that summer research experience that led to my NSF award and because of the work in psychopathic personality disorder I had already begun with my advisor, David Watson.

What makes the Ph.D. in Psychology program distinctive?

For me, Notre Dame’s Ph.D. in Psychology program is distinctive because of the opportunities it provides for collaboration with other institutions in addition to clinical training in forensic and psychological assessment to assist with legal and courtroom decision-making.

The program also provides excellent quantitative training, professional development, and faculty advisement. I appreciate the open-door policy of faculty members with similar interests who, in turn, create an excellent relationship between psychology and clinical research pedagogy.

I appreciate many things about my department, but most of all, I appreciate the support from faculty members like Scott Maxwell, Alison Ying, Zhiyong (Johnny) Zhang, and Guangjian Zhang who, without any doubt, have aided and positively influenced my quantitative statistical learning process. Together, these professors, along with Tom Merluzzi, Lee Anna Clark, Daniel Lapsley, and my advisor, put me in a better position — physically, emotionally, and mentally — to conduct qualitative and quantitative, empirically sound research projects. In turn, their support has propelled me to become an example to others who struggle with statistical analysis in the early stages of their graduate studies, and the undergraduate students whom I mentor as they pursue an honors thesis.

“I appreciate many things about my department, but most of all, I appreciate the support from faculty members ... who put me in a better position — physically, emotionally, and mentally — to conduct qualitative and quantitative, empirically sound research projects. In turn, their support has propelled me to become an example to others.”

What do you hope to do after Notre Dame — and how do you feel the program is preparing you for the job market?

I hope to work as a clinical psychologist in private practice conducting psychological assessments for the community. I also hope to work as a professor in a psychology department and law school teaching forensic and legal psychology. My goal, through professorship, leadership, and mentorship — with a focus on diversity and inclusivity — is to encourage and support the research of women, people with disabilities, and members of racial and sexual and gender minority communities.

The Notre Dame Graduate School provides an abundance of professional development resources; grants and fellowships; and teaching, mentorship, and leadership programs that have helped me through the clinical program. These resources have better prepared me for the teaching job market and professorship, making me a better mentor, leader, practicing clinician, and instructor.

Originally published by Carrie Gates at al.nd.edu on May 04, 2021.

Notre Dame psychologist Jessica Payne receives National Academy of Sciences recognition, National Science Foundation funding for her research on sleep, stress, and memory

2021-02-07T09:00:00-05:00

Psychologist Jessica Payne is passionate about helping the world better understand the value of sleep — and the many ways it impacts our cognition, health, and longevity.

She dreams of a society where people no longer take pride in how little sleep they need to get by, but how much they sleep in order to thrive.

“It’s mystifying to me that there is still such a cultural disconnect between the science and our social reality,” Payne said. “There is so much negative messaging and downright mythology about sleep. There’s this idea that if you’re only committed enough to your job or strong enough as a person, you’ll sleep less because it’s a waste of time. But science shows us the opposite is true.

“I want to use science to convince students, individuals, and organizations that it’s not only permitted but expected that if you get tired in the middle of the day, you put your head down and take a short, 20-minute or less nap.”

Payne’s groundbreaking research on the relationship between sleep, stress, and psychological function has led to her being selected as the National Academy of Sciences 2021 Seymour Benzer/Sydney Brenner Lecturer. She is slated to give the public lecture on her research in Irvine, California, this spring.

“For me, this is more than just a personal honor — I am also encouraged that the National Academy is paying attention to sleep because sleep neuroscience and sleep science have not been given the respect they’re due for so long,” she said. “I’m very excited to be part of this initiative where I can talk to the public and the scientific community.”

Payne has also recently been awarded a nearly $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for her project, “Sleep and Selective Emotional Memory Consolidation from Young Adulthood through Middle Age.”

In the four-year study, Payne and her colleagues will examine the relationship between sleep and memory in middle-aged adults — a demographic that is particularly understudied, she said.

“There are a lot of sleep issues that start to emerge in middle age, and at the same time, memory complaints start to emerge,” Payne said. “It seems obvious to me to look for a connection. It’s possible that our sleep architecture changes and the reduced quality or quantity of our sleep is having an impact on our cognitive abilities. If we can improve sleep quality, we may be able to improve cognition and memory as well.”

“There is so much negative messaging and downright mythology about sleep. There’s this idea that if you’re only committed enough to your job or strong enough as a person, you’ll sleep less because it’s a waste of time. But science shows us the opposite is true. I want to use science to convince students, individuals, and organizations that it’s not only permitted but expected that if you get tired in the middle of the day, you put your head down and take a short, 20-minute or less nap.”

An active state

Sleep is not just a biological necessity, but a very active state for our brains, Payne said.

“And it’s an active state in the specific brain regions associated with things we all care about, like learning, memory, decision-making, creativity, and stress regulation,” she said.

There is growing evidence that one purpose of sleep is to strengthen memories formed during the day, particularly if they are emotionally salient. However, the majority of this evidence stems from college-age research participants and may not be generalizable to the broader population.

The same commitments and responsibilities that have traditionally made it more difficult for middle-aged adults to participate in research studies may also be the culprits behind their sleep deficits, she said.

“I feel like middle age is a time when our habits change because the pressures we are under are immense — working, caring for children and sometimes aging parents — and it’s a lot to balance,” she said. “So it’s not surprising to me, given the connection between stress and sleep, that we see sleep problems or deficiencies develop at this point.”

Those problems not only affect quality of life for middle-age adults, but may also affect how they age, cognitively and neurologically.

“I’m very interested in how the things we’re doing now — for good or for bad — impact the way we ultimately age,” she said. “I think we all really hope we can flourish in old age, not just live a long time, but have quality of life. And there’s a lot of preliminary evidence that sleep is critical for that.”

Building on this project, Payne also hopes to conduct a longitudinal study in the future on how stressors and sleep quality in middle age influence cognitive functioning.

Memory reactivation

Payne examines data in her Sleep, Stress, and Memory Lab on campus.

Payne and her research team are also launching a study on targeted memory reactivation. It is established that pairing a learning event with a scent or a tone can help a participant to recall the information when the cue is reintroduced. But, she has also found that reintroducing the cue at a very low level while the participant is in a deep stage of sleep reactivates the memory as well.

“Sleep already helps with memory, but if you reapply a memory cue during sleep, it’s actually even better,” she said. “This has clear, practical implications for improving our ability to learn or potentially stave off age-related memory decline.”

Payne’s newest study takes that concept a step further to explore ways to deepen and improve sleep for people suffering from depression or anxiety disorders by using the same strategy to help them learn and, ultimately, reactivate relaxation techniques.

“We know that stress and anxiety, and all their concomitant mental health issues, are associated with poor-quality, fractured and fragmented sleep,” she said. “We’re training people in meditative relaxation techniques, paired with certain tones, and then we’ll be replaying those tones during sleep. We’re predicting and hoping to see positive changes in their sleep architecture and measures of wellbeing.”

The relaxation study is particularly promising, she said, because it targets two parts of participants’ systems that are struggling at the same time, and could help reverse the “sleep-stress spiral”, as Payne calls it, often associated with these disorders.

“These exercises have been shown to be helpful for reducing stress hormones and physiology during the day,” she said. “Reactivating that relaxation state during sleep could suppress the stress we think is causing sleep disruptions. If you can both reduce stress and improve sleep, we would expect to see much better psychological outcomes.”

Improving lives

The University has been incredibly supportive of her research, Payne said, through the building of a state-of-the-art sleep lab as part of the Corbett Family Hall project and the project funding she’s received through the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.

She also sees a natural fit between her research and the Notre Dame mission.

“I am very concerned about the science of sleep and stress and their impacts on the brain,” she said. “But I’m especially interested in applying these findings to improve the quality of people’s lives — and that is very consistent with the University’s mission.

“We’re really excited to improve human flourishing by treating this very overlooked phenomenon that just happens to take up one third of your life. We should be focused on how to improve it and treat it when it goes awry, whether that’s through the aging process or clinical issues.”

“We’re really excited to improve human flourishing by treating this very overlooked phenomenon that just happens to take up one third of your life. We should be focused on how to improve it and treat it when it goes awry, whether that’s through the aging process or clinical issues.”

Originally published by Carrie Gates at al.nd.edu on February 03, 2021.

Two Arts and Letters faculty members receive NSF Early Career Development Awards

2020-10-08T10:00:00-04:00

Two Arts and Letters faculty members — sociologist Erin McDonnell and psychologist Nathan Rose — have received National Science Foundation Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards for 2020. They are among nine University of Notre Dame faculty members to receive the awards this year.

Since 2014, Notre Dame faculty have earned 49 NSF CAREER Awards — which provide five years of support to early-career faculty who “have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.”

“This is the most prestigious award granted by the NSF to early-career faculty and reflects the quality of Erin McDonnell’s and Nathan Rose’s research,” said Sarah Mustillo, the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters. “I am thrilled that they are continuing the College’s strong record of success with these awards.”

McDonnell, an associate professor of sociology, was recognized for her project, “Pockets of Effectiveness and the Diffusion of Organizational Capacity,” which explores areas of organizational excellence within the Ghanaian state.

“This award really sets a platform for the next five years of my life,” McDonnell said. “It structures the major moments and movements of my career, charting this path and making it possible to do this really ambitious research I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise.”

Rose, the William P. and Hazel B. White Collegiate Chair in psychology, received the award for his project, “Targeted Memory Reactivation with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation,” which seeks to identify the mechanisms that enable the reactivation of information passively retained in working memory.

“It was incredibly validating and rewarding for me to receive the CAREER Award,” he said. “It will not just potentiate my career, but will enable us to offer undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to find their niche and hone their research skills and career goals as well.”

“This is the most prestigious award granted by the NSF to early-career faculty and reflects the quality of Erin McDonnell’s and Nathan Rose’s research. I am thrilled that they are continuing the College’s strong record of success with these awards.”

— Sarah Mustillo, the I.A. O’Shaughnessy Dean of the College of Arts and Letters

Pockets of Effectiveness

Patchwork Leviathan by Erin Metz McDonnell

McDonnell is exploring questions that emerged from her most recent book project, Patchwork Leviathan: Pockets of Bureaucratic Effectiveness in Developing States. That project examined groups or agencies in the public sector, especially in low-income states that are typically seen as weak and ineffectual, that are nevertheless incredibly effective.

Her next project tackles the question of whether and how those successful pockets can spread, using a case study of the commercial courts in Ghana. Once travel restrictions related to the coronavirus pandemic are lifted, McDonnell plans to travel to Ghana with a team of undergraduate student research assistants, to observe court proceedings and interview key members of the court system.

“The CAREER Award is focused on research and teaching being very intertwined, and I’m excited about the mentorship component of this project, both in terms of ways I can integrate this data into my classes and in terms of including students in the research process.”

The project will also include an annual workshop that will bring together advanced graduate students in different disciplines — including political science, sociology, public administration, and psychology — from across the country to examine issues surrounding effective statecraft.

McDonnell, who holds a concurrent appointment in the Department of Africana Studies and is a faculty fellow in the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, said that Notre Dame is one of the best places in the country to be doing international research, particularly in low-income countries.

“The resources that the University brings together through the College, the Kellogg Institute, and the Keough School of Global Affairs in terms of faculty and support is just unparalleled,” she said. “Just being in an environment where I’m talking constantly with colleagues in sociology and economics and political science who work on development — it refines your thinking in a way that is enormously helpful. That kind of robust, intellectual community was priceless for making this happen.”

“Just being in an environment where I’m talking constantly with colleagues in sociology and economics and political science who work on development — it refines your thinking in a way that is enormously helpful. That kind of robust, intellectual community was priceless for making this happen.”

— Erin McDonnell

Targeted Memory Reactivation

Rose, prepping an EEG cap for a former research assistant during a TMS experiment

Rose’s project follows up on his groundbreaking research on noninvasive brain stimulation and working memory.

“We were able to stimulate different parts of people's brains through transcranial magnetic stimulation, and by decoding the neural activity, we could see that we were reactivating these memories that appeared to have been lost,” he said. “It was a really exciting finding and the first time anyone had shown that could be done — but we don't exactly know why or how we were able to recover these memories. So, it really opened up a lot more questions that we have to address.”

His long-term goal is to reveal how working memory — a system that’s vital for nearly all aspects of cognitive functioning — works and why it breaks down in older adults.

In this project, Rose is gathering evidence on the roles of the frontal, parietal, and sensory regions of the brain in storing and reactivating latent working memories. His research seeks to identify the precise neurocognitive processes that underlie age-related memory deficits. Rose also hopes to identify specific ways to use noninvasive brain stimulation to enhance working and long-term memory.

Rose’s research is a crucial part of the department’s increased focus on building a cognitive brain behavior program that includes neuroimaging and neurostimulation tools and technologies to help advance the training of psychology and neuroscience and behavior students.

The University’s commitment to developing this program was key to him winning the NSF CAREER Award, he said.

“I would not have been able to do this without the generous support of Notre Dame,” Rose said. “We have a beautiful new lab in Corbett Family Hall with state-of-the-art equipment that is one of only a handful of its kind in the world. I am also incredibly grateful for the support of my colleagues and the dean of the College in the development of this research.”

“I would not have been able to do this without the generous support of Notre Dame. We have a beautiful new lab in Corbett Family Hall with state-of-the-art equipment that is one of only a handful of its kind in the world. I am also incredibly grateful for the support of my colleagues and the dean of the College in the development of this research.”

— Nathan Rose

Originally published by Carrie Gates at al.nd.edu on October 06, 2020.

Psychologist Nathan Rose receives NSF Early Career award

2020-10-06T09:00:00-04:00

Nathan Rose prepping an EEG cap for a former research assistant during a TMS experiment

Two Arts and Letters faculty members — psychologist Nathan Rose and sociologist Erin McDonnell — have received National Science Foundation Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards for 2020. They are among nine University of Notre Dame faculty members to receive the awards this year.

Rose, the William P. and Hazel B. White Collegiate Chair in psychology, received the award for his project, “Targeted Memory Reactivation with Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation.” The project seeks to identify the mechanisms that enable the reactivation of information passively retained in working memory.

“It was incredibly validating and rewarding for me to receive the CAREER Award. It will not just potentiate my career, but will enable us to offer undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to find their niche and hone their research skills and career goals as well.”

Targeted Memory Reactivation

Nathan Rose

Rose’s current project follows up on his groundbreaking research on noninvasive brain stimulation and working memory. With that work, Rose became the first faculty member from Notre Dame’s Department of Psychology to be published in the prestigious journal Science.

“We were able to stimulate different parts of people's brains through transcranial magnetic stimulation, and by decoding the neural activity while we stimulated the brain, we could see that we were reactivating these memories that appeared to have been lost,” he said.

“It was a really exciting finding and the first time anyone had shown that could be done — but we don't exactly know why or how we were able to recover these memories. So, it really opened up a lot more questions that we have to address.”

His long-term goal is to reveal how working memory — a system that’s vital for nearly all aspects of cognitive functioning — works and why it breaks down in older adults.

Noninvasive Brain Stimulation

The beauty of transcranial magnetic stimulation, Rose said, is that it is noninvasive. Participants connected to the neuroimaging machines receive painless magnetic pulses targeted to different regions of the brain, while performing memory tasks.

“The exciting thing about these methodological and technological advances is that this stimulation has very minimal, if any negative side effects,” Rose said. “And part of the problem with pharmaceutical interventions is that you typically have to administer them at high dosages that may have other negative side effects. This research goes along with the push in medicine now for more personalized, targeted approaches to treatment of specific deficient mechanisms.”

“The exciting thing about these methodological and technological advances is that this stimulation has very minimal, if any negative side effects. ... This research goes along with the push in medicine now for more personalized, targeted approaches to treatment of specific deficient mechanisms.”

Outreach Across Generations

The project also includes a outreach component, involving both older adults and youth in the local community.

Rose will be offering a course on memory, aging, and the brain at South Bend’s Forever Learning Institute, as well as creating a series of outreach activities to share his research with students at a local high school focused on STEM fields.

“Part of the National Science Foundation's initiative is to promote STEM fields in children and high school students as well,” Rose said. “And we’re excited to introduce high school students to some really cool research that might shift their idea of what a viable career path is. I tell them that I was in their shoes — I didn’t know anything about cognitive neuroscience, but when I was introduced to it, I found my passion. I want to show them they can do this, too.”

Strong Institutional Support

Rose’s research is a crucial part of the department’s increased focus on building a cognitive brain behavior program that includes neuroimaging and neurostimulation tools and technologies to help advance the training for psychology and neuroscience and behavior students.

The University’s commitment to developing this program has been invaluable, he said — and was key to him winning the CAREER Award.

“I would not have been able to do this without the generous support of Notre Dame. We have a beautiful new lab in Corbett Family Hall with state-of-the-art equipment that is one of only a handful of its kind in the world. I am also incredibly grateful for the support of my colleagues and the dean of the College in the development of this research.”

IMPORTANT UPDATE: GRE REQUIREMENT 2020-21 APPLICATIONS

2020-09-25T11:00:00-04:00

As of August 19, the Psychology Department has voted to NOT ACCEPT THE GRE OR GRE SUBJECT TEST for the 2020-21 admission cycle (meaning, for students who are applying to begin in Fall 2021). …

Notre Dame’s spring semester to begin Feb. 3

2020-09-25T11:00:00-04:00

Dennis Brown | September 24, 2020

The University of Notre Dame plans to begin the 2021 spring semester with in-person classes Feb. 3, forgo spring break and end classes May 11, the University’s president, Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., announced today in a letter to students, faculty and staff.

The start of the semester will be three weeks later than originally scheduled and classes will end two weeks later. Final exams will be held May 14, 15, 17, 18 and 19, and commencement ceremonies will take place the weekend of May 22-23. The University will not hold classes on Good Friday, April 2, and will provided enhanced opportunities for students to celebrate Easter on campus.

In explaining the later start and finish to the semester, Father Jenkins wrote: “The cold temperatures of winter will not allow us to use outdoor spaces as we have so far this fall, and the winter months are also the peak for seasonal flu in this region. Consequently, after discussions with the President’s Faculty Advisory Committee, the Academic Reopening Committee, the President’s Leadership Council and the Student Advisory Group for Campus Reopening, we have decided to shift the dates for the second semester of the 2020-21 academic year to lessen our time on campus during these winter months.”