Faculty

"My primary interest concerns people's values and goals, and how they relate to quality of life. Over the last decade I have been especially focused on studying 'materialistic values,' i.e., being wealthy, having many possessions, being attractive, and being popular."

"To the extent that there is a common theme tying my research together, it is that I study human social behavior from an evolutionary perspective. I am especially interested in understanding the psychology of everyday life. Why do we enjoy gossip about celebrities? Why do some people name their children after themselves while others do not? How do 21st century social networking tools such as Facebook satisfy prehistoric social needs?"

"I am doing work on human sexual psychophysiology. I am interested in the origins of patterns of sexual attraction and sexual arousal, in other words what turns people on and why. Most recently I have been looking at the role of learning processes and alcohol use as triggers for sexual compulsivity and sexual risk taking. I also have an animal lab that is set up to look at the neurochemical correlates of behavior. My original interest had been in developmental differences in learning in rats and the role of monoamine and neuropeptide transmitters in such ontogenetic differences. Students in this lab also work on a broader range of projects, examining how various drugs affect behavior, many focusing on drugs of abuse. Both of these areas of research involve inter- and intra- departmental cooperation, i.e., I have worked with other psychology and neuroscience faculty and students from the biology, biochemistry, and the chemistry departments."

"I study the social psychology of health behavior. My broad goals are to develop theory regarding health behavior decision-making and provide information about the fundamentals of social psychology that can be translated into practical application. I mostly investigate social-cognitive factors of health behavior decision-making across the different stages of behavior, giving primary attention to elucidating the distinct set of factors that guide decisions about behavior maintenance and delineating the underlying role of self-concept. Most recently, I have been focusing on the sources of behavior-specific identities (e.g., self-identity as a "smoker"), with particular interest in the relationship between these identities and perceptions of the typical person who engages in the associated behavior. This is segueing into more basic research on the sources, maintenance, and action of the self-concept. My research to date consists of experimental and survey studies in laboratory and community settings. I have an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach."

"Places of education should not be places for unchanging dogma or static ways of doing things. What we know about teaching and learning continues to change, as do our ideas of what constitutes a good education for individuals and how that education can further the public "good." This results in a continuing search for that which is best in pedagogy, content knowledge and social action. Translating the results of that search, the ideals, into programs of action, speaks to what I try to do with my students as well as try to encourage them to do in their future classrooms."

"I am broadly interested in the psychology of political behavior, both of the masses and elites. My recent work has focused on voting behavior and emotions."

"My most immediate projects are in the areas of Black Studies theory, African American literary criticism, Black psychology traditions, and the status of Blacks in Latin America."

Mountjoy's general interests include the function of song repertoires in Yellow-throated Vireos, including field work in Costa Rica on song variation in woodcreepers and song-sharing in White-breasted Wood-Wrens; comparative analyses of song repertoires in varied avian taxa; function of song repertoires and extended song learning in Red-eyed Vireos; comparative analyses of the evolution of song repertoire size in the genus Vireo.

"My research takes an interdisciplinary approach, spanning the fields of behavioral ecology, ornithology, experimental and comparative psychology, and neuroethology. The focus of my studies is on learning, memory, and foraging behavior, and involves experimental work in the field and lab. In particular, I am interested in the ecological and cognitive factors that have influenced the evolution of decision-making processes, information use, and learning in solitary and group-living species. I am the campus co-advisor for the ACM Tanzania program, which I co-directed with Jim Mountjoy in 2005."

Judith Thorn's general interests include signal transduction, the cytoskeleton, endocytosis, cell movements, development, dog behavior and training, and animal assisted therapy.