Summer Scholars Program
Psychology Department
2010 Volunteer Faculty Mentors
Dr. Matthew Anderson
Dr. Anderson's research focuses on animal learning and behavior. Students working with Dr. Anderson will run experimental animals (rats) or conduct behavioral observations of Caribbean flamingos at the Philadelphia Zoo. A strong background in psychology or biology is required. More information on specific projects can be found on Dr. Anderson's personal web page: http://www.sju.edu/~mander06/
Dr. Chris Lawson
Dr. Lawson's research investigates cognitive development in infants and young children. His work aims to understand the development of categorization - how do children develop the ability to distinguish concepts as members of distinct groups? Students working with Dr. Lawson will conduct behavioral experiments with young children and/or habituation experiments with infants. Please contact Dr. Lawson (clawson@sju.edu) to learn more about the opportunities available in the lab over the summer.
Dr. Jodi Mindell
Research interests -- Dr. Jodi Mindell's primary research interests are in the area of pediatric sleep and sleep disorders.
Dr. Josephine Shih
Dr. Shih is a clinical psychologist with research interests in the area of mood disorders. She is interested in better understanding risk factors of depression; how they interact with each other and the mechanisms through which they exert their influence on depression. It is a well-replicated statistic that females are two times more likely to become depressed than males. Dr. Shih is particularly interested in testing models that explain this sex difference in depression. Students interested in working with Dr. Shih may pursue projects examining interpersonal and cognitive predictors of stressful life events and depressed mood. She has mentored students in the past on projects on dating violence, co-rumination, and culture and emotional expression.
Dr. Alex Skolnick
The project is on the History of the psychological study of emotion from the 1890s to the 1920s. This period of time is almost universally skipped when describing the history of emotion, yet there was a plethora of research activity at the time. As far as I know, there has never been a study of emotion research from this period. The project would entail doing literature searches and reading original texts, both articles and books to form a picture of the nature and scope of interests in emotion during those 30 years.