Categorization and causal reasoning are my two main areas of research interest. Concepts are the building blocks of our thinking. However, it is still controversial how concepts are represented in the mind and why we have the categories that we have. For example, why is it that we have such concepts as dogs and unicorns but not such concepts as red pointy things? I examine how people create and learn new concepts. I take a Cognitive Science approach, comparing Artificial Intelligence theories with Psychological theories. 

Traditional theories on concepts have assumed that concepts are coherent because members in the same category are similar to each other. In contrast, I argue that conceptual representations are like scientific theories in that features of concepts (e.g., "have legs" "jump" in dog category) are causally related to each other. In order to fully develop this so-called theory-based or explanation-based approach to categorization, I have also studies how we construct causal explanations and identify causes of events. My most recent research concerns the role of causal explanations in categorization. For example, causal relations among features of a concept can determine the centrality of features. Causal structures within a concept can specify how people make inferences about other concepts. These studies have direct implications for how we form and change stereotypes (i.e.., a special case of person categories), how clinicians use clinical categories when diagnosing patients, and how experts' and novices' categorization processes differ as a function of causal background knowledge. 

Ahn, W., Brewer, W. F., & Mooney, R. J. (1992). Schema acquisition from a single example. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory,& Cognition, 18(2), 391-412. 

Ahn, W., Kalish, C. W., Medin, D. L., & Gelman, S. A. (1995). The role of covariation versus mechanism information in causal attribution. Cognition, 54, 299-352. 

My research is devoted to the analysis of the cognitive structures and processes that govern social behavior. Social cognition approaches broadly construed define the methods I use. In particular, my interests have focused on the role of social factors in memory, and this interest is reflected in research on the mnemonic function of self knowledge, the influence of affective intensity and valence on memory, and the role of implicit memory in stereotyping and prejudice. At present, I devote much of my time to research on the unconscious operation of stereotypes, and prejudice. Research on implicit memory demonstrates that individuals who show little or no conscious recollection of an event nevertheless display savings on indirect measures (e.g., lexical decisions, perceptual identification, judgments of liking, etc.). Likewise, by using implicit measures of stereotypes we are discovering how social category features (e.g., race, gender) that are placed outside awareness can nevertheless have powerful influences on thought and behavior. In particular, we are learning about the unconscious operation of stereotypes in consciously unprejudiced individuals who appear to be unaware of the influence of stigmatized attributes of social objects on their thought and behavior. Our research is aimed at providing an understanding of the subtle yet important manner in which stereotyped judgments are produced, and to question the currently dominant conception that such evaluations operate primarily within consciousness. We see this research as ultimately relevant to analyses of the role of intention of and responsibility in social interaction and theories of justice and equality. 

Banaji, M. R., & Greenwald, A. G. (1995). Implicit gender stereotyping in judgments of fame. Journal of Social and Personality Psychology, 68, 181-198. 

Greenwald, A. G., & Banaji, M. R. (1995). Implicit social cognition: Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Psychological Review, 102, 1-27. 

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My laboratory is interested in neurobiological mechanisms of learning and memory - from the molecular to the behavioral levels - with a major focus on rapid forms of learning. The brain structures on which we concentrate, which include the hippocampus, amygdala, and perirhinal cortex, are implicated in aspects of declarative and emotional learning. They are also implicated in a aging-related forms of neuropathology and accompanying behavioral and mental changes. One working hypothesis is that rapid learning emerges from use-dependent modifications, such as long-term potentiation, in pre-existing synaptic connections. Accordingly, a long-term thrust of my research has been to develop techniques that enable a rigorous analysis of the biophysics and microphysiology of synapses and neurons in brain structures such as the hippocampus, amygdala and perirhinal cortex that have been implicated in rapid learning. To this end, we apply powerful optical and biophysical techniques to study rapid and persistent synaptic modifications. The in vitro methods include patch-clamp recording, quantal analysis, confocal microscopy and calcium imaging, and anatomical reconstructions of recorded neurons. More recently the research has expanded to include characterization of the neural circuits and systems involved in rapid learning. The in vivo methods include tracing axonal projections of physiologically characterized neurons, behavioral neurophysiological studies, and analysis of a rapidly-induced form of Pavlovian conditioning whose underlying circuitry is relatively simple. The experimental knowledge we gain about synapses, circuits, systems and behavior is being incorporated into computational models for theoretical studies. 

Xiang, Z., Greenwood, A. C., Kairiss, E. W., & Brown, T. H. (1994). Quantal mechanisms of long-term potentiation in hippocampal mossy-fiber synapses. Journal of Neurophysiology, 71, 2552-2556. 

Canli, T., and Brown, T. H. (1996). Amygdala stimulation enhances the rat eyeblink reflex through a short latency mechanism. Behavior Neuroscience, 1, 51-59. 

The theme underlying my research, which deals primarily with eating and body weight regulation, is an interest in the intersection of behavior and health. One focus is the conflict between culture, which shapes the perception that our bodies and our health can be controlled, and the genetic, environmental, and other factors which limit actual personal control. We are studying the degree to which body weight and shape can be altered, and how this is influenced by factors such as genetic predisposition, body fat distribution, life stress, the modern diet, and psychological status. 

We are currently investigating a number of issues related to eating disorders, obesity, and more generally, health psychology. Projects are underway on the effects of stress and depression on eating, the association of physical and sexual abuse to the etiology of eating disorders and obesity, the psychological consequences of obesity, cognitive predispositions to eating disorders, interpersonal and cognitive-behavioral treatments for eating disorders, disordered eating and body image problems in athletes, exercise and body weight regulation, and the effects of weight cycling on behavior, metabolism, and health. 

In the Yale Center for Eating and Weight Disorders, undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty take part in both clinical work and research pertaining to bulimia nervosa, anorexia nervosa, and obesity. The stimulating environment provides multiple opportunities for clinical training and for research on all aspects of eating problems, ranging from etiology through prevention. 

Brownell, K. D., & Rodin, J. (1994). The dieting maelstrom: Is it possible and advisable to lose weight? American Psychologist 49, 781-791. 

Brownell, K. D., & Fairburn, C. G. (Eds.). (1995). Eating disorders and obesity: A comprehensive handbook. New York: Guilford. 

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The focus of my research centers of the neuronal mechanisms underlying learning and memory. We have approached this question by studying the marine mollusc Aplysia, because its central nervous system is well-suited for detailed cellular and molecular investigation. My research program is divided into three parts. The first part is designed to examine how different forms of learning and memory emerge and are functionally assembled during development. In this research we combine: (1) quantitative behavioral studies; (2) neurophysiological experiments (using current, voltage and patch clamp techniques); (3) immunocytochemical techniques (to study the expression of different neurotransmitter systems); and (4) biochemical experiments (to analyze the functional expression of second messenger systems such as cAMP). The second part of our research program uses computational methods in conjunction with cellular experiments to determine the rules of information processing that contribute to learning and memory in identified neural circuits. The third part of our program examines the mechanistic relationship between short term and long term memory on cellular and molecular levels. 

Carew, T. J. (1989). Developmental assembly of learning in Aplysia. Trends in Neuroscience, 12, 389-394. 

Emptage, N. J., & Carew, T. J. (1993). Long-term synaptic facilitation in the absence of short-term facilitation in Aplysia neurons. 

My research is concerned with emotional development in infancy and early childhood with an emphasis on factors that place children at risk in the areas of affect regulation and interpersonal relationships. My research focuses on dimensions of mothers' interactive style which may facilitate or interfere with the broadening of self regulatory capacities in infancy. A common theme throughout my work is the integration of clinical and developmental approaches. 

Recently, I have become interested in studying methods for understanding the joint contribution of underlying genetic vulnerability and environmental risk factors in developmental psychopathology. I am particularly interested in studying children at genetic risk for social emotional difficulties due to the presence of a parent or sibling with a psychiatric condition (e.g., depression, Tourette's Syndrome, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). While a preponderance of evidence documents that these children are at increased risk for a wide range of developmental and psychological difficulties issues of specificity, critical periods of exposure, and the joint contribution of the family environment and underlying genetic vulnerability have yet to be explored adequately. 

A final area of research concerns the development of improved assessment methods for documenting developmental, emotional and behavioral difficulties in infancy for purposes of screening and diagnosis. 

Carter, A. S., Mayes, L. C., & Pajer, K. A. (1990). The role of dyadic affect in play and infant sex in predicting infant response to the still-face situation. Child Development, 61, 764-773. 

Carter, A. S., Pauls, D. L., Leckman, J. F., & Cohen, D. J. A prospective longitudinal study of Gilles de la Tourette's syndrome. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 33, 377-385. 

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My research interests are in visual cognition with a focus on visual attention and object recognition. Despite severe limitations in higher-level processing, we can effortlessly perceive and interact with the visual environment without 'down-time' in our rich conscious experience. How do attentional mechanisms select and integrate visual information over both space and time? Specific areas of research include 1) the Attentional Blink and Repetition Blindness which allow us to study the time course of visual processing, 2) Visual search and texture segregation tasks which are useful paradigms for inferring the spatial properties of vision, and 3) Tracking tasks which measure our ability to follow items that move around over both time and space. In addition, object recognition and visual memory mechanisms are considered in this research program. 

My goal is to characterize important visual processes and identify their neural substrates, and thus I rely on both psychophysics and cognitive neuroscience approaches. In the lab, data is mainly obtained from human participants viewing computer-generated video displays. Through collaborations with Dr. Nancy Kanwisher, fMRI is used to localize cortical areas involved in object and face recognition. I also plan to extend the research described by utilizing additional functional imaging techniques and testing relevant clinical populations. 

Chun, M. M., & Wolfe, J. M. (1996). Just say no: How are visual search trials terminated when there is no target present? Cognitive Psychology, 30, 39-78. 

Chun, M. M., & Potter, M. C. (1995). A two-stage model for multiple target detection in rapid serial visual presentation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 21, 109-127. 

For the past several years, my research has focused on the study of human motivation. In particular, my work has centered on the distinction between "intrinsic" and "extrinsic" motivational orientations and on the effects that these differing orientations might have on a number of variables such as learning and self-efficacy. In sharp contrast to the classic work in this area which focused, for the most part, on the study of variables that undermine intrinsic motivation, our laboratory has investigated the effects of various theoretically-derived techniques specifically  designed to enhance intrinsic motivation. In addition, we are also interested in the cross-cultural study of intrinsic motivation. 

I also conduct research on the related topics of prejudice, discrimination, and racism. One line of research has looked at the cognitive and motivational components of a phenomenon we have labelled the denial of personal disadvantage. This phenomenon involves members of disadvantaged groups perceiving more discrimination directed at their group in general compared to themselves personally as a member of that group. A second line of research focuses on the attributional ambiguity of affirmative action and on issues related to minority student achievement. 

Lepper, M. R., & Cordova, D. I. (1992). A desire to be taught: Instructional consequences of intrinsic motivation. Motivation and Emotion, 16, 187-208. 

Crosby, F. J., Cordova, D. I., & Jaskar, K. (1993). On the failure to see oneself as disadvantaged: Cognitive and emotional components. In M. A. Hogg and D. Abrams (Eds.), Group motivation: Social psychological perspectives. New York: Springer-Verlag. 

My main research interest has been for many years in auditory cognition, with excursions into "mainstream" memory research. One theme has been a proposal John Morton and I made in 1969 for how auditory memory manifests itself in information-processing tasks such as digit span. Research in my laboratory and elsewhere during the 1980s has proven these ideas to have been mistaken, as originally stated, and I continue to seek a theoretical resolution. Meanwhile, I am pursuing several problems broadly deriving from the auditory-memory work, among them: 1. Auditory contrast in the identification and discrimination of vowel sounds. 2. Musical cognition, especially perception of the major/minor distinction, perception of time in musical phrases, and the integration of melody and text in memory for songs. 3. Recency, forgetting theory, and the distinction between serial order and time in memory. 4. Imagery for musical timbre. An additional project has to do with memory for odors, a topic that is far from auditory cognition but one that engages the same issues of disentangling memory for sensory quality from memory for verbal descriptions of events. 

Crowder, R. G. (1992). Short-term memory: Where do we stand? Memory and Cognition, 21, 142-145. 

Crowder, R. G. (1993). Systems and principles in memory theory: Another critique of pure memory. In A.F. Collins, S.E. Gathercole, M.A. Conway, & P. E. Morris (Eds.), Theories of memory. East Sussex, England: Erlbaum. 

The goal of my laboratory is to develop neuronal models of associative learning phenomena in vertebrate nervous systems. The experimental work we focus on utilizes the rabbit conditioned eyeblink preparation which, at the behavioral level, has been used extensively to study these "simple" forms of learning. In the past, I have used a top-down approach to model development to show how elaborations on a rudimentary cerebellar and brain stem model of acquisition can, in principle, account for a much broader range of learning phenomena (e.g., acquisition, blocking, extinction, conditioned inhibition, and a conditioned diminution of the UR). This more complete model was developed by translating learning algorithms from psychological models (e.g., Rescorla-Wagner, SOP) into abstract neural network (connectionist) models and mapping from these network models into the basic neuronal circuit developed to explain acquisition. Over the past several years we have used a variety of physiological manipulations (e.g., electrical stimulation of particular pathways; local infusion of drugs that inactivate target structures) to evaluate the specific predictions of the model regarding the neuronal mechanisms by which a trained CS could associatively diminish US processing and thus produce a negatively accelerated acquisition curve, blocking, and a conditioned diminution of the UR. 

More recently, Dr. Michael Mauk and I have developed a cerebellar and brain stem model of eyeblink conditioning that addresses the issues of temporal dynamics: how manipulating the temporal relationships between the CS and US (the interstimulus-interval, ISI) affects both the rate of CR acquisition and the timing of the eyeblink CR. In addressing these issues, we have focused on how the organization of the cerebellar cortex could allow for the formation of a complex representation of the CS, i.e., how the CS can be represented in terms of a collection of features, coded by subsets of granule cells, that vary systematically over time. The importance of this model is that the timing mechanisms are not built into the model. What we have attempted to show is that a time-varying representation of the CS and timing of the CR naturally emerge from the organizational and functional properties of the cerebellar cortex. (The model also addresses phenomena such as blocking, extinction, and conditioned inhibition.) 

Donegan, N. H., Gluck, M. A., & Thompson, R. F. (1989). Integrating behavioral and biological models of classical conditioning. In R.D. Hawkins & G.H. Bower (Eds.), Computational models of learning in simple neural systems, Vol. 23, The psychology of learning and motivation. New York: Academic Press. 

Canli, T., & Donegan, N. H. (1995). Conditioned diminution of the unconditioned response in rabbit eyeblink conditioning: Identifying neural substrates in the cerebellum and brainstem. Behavioral Neuroscience, 109, 892. 

My primary research interests include racial stereotyping, prejudice, and stigma. I have conducted a number of studies to delineate the factors influencing black Americans' perceptions of prejudice and discrimination in their interactions with whites. Although there has been an abundance of research on stereotyping and prejudice in social psychology, few studies have examined the social attributions formed by the targets of racial stereotypes. In addition, I am interested in how race impacts social interactions for both blacks and whites. For example, when might race become salient during an interaction? What are some effective strategies for providing people with feedback about their racial attitudes and how might these strategies differ for blacks and whites? Finally, and most recently, I have begun to examine the nature of racial categories. I am particularly interested in examining social psychological implications of viewing race as a natural category rather than a socially created one. In addition how might racial stereotyping relate to the creation and perpetuation of racial categories? An how might these categories affect interpersonal interactions? 

Eberhardt, J. L., & Randall, J. L. (in press). The essential notion of race. Psychological Science. 

Eberhardt, J. L., & Fiske, S. T. (1996). Motivating individuals to change: What's a target to do? In N. Macrae, C. Stagor, & M. Hewstone (Eds.). Stereotypes and stereotyping. New York: Guilford Press. 

I have been interested in social cognition, specifically in the topic of person perception. How we mentally represent, retrieve, and use information about others is likely to mediate our judgments and social interactions. My research has attempted to expand somewhat the current focus of extant conceptualizations by demonstrating that we not only form impressions of individuals qua individuals, but also of the relationships between individuals. Such relationship impressions, like individual impressions, are shown to influence our interpretation of and memory for specific social behaviors. The concept of "cognitive sociometry" captures the idea that we form impressions of individuals as participants in relationships and members of small societies. 

I am also interested in character assessment: how, why, and with what consequences do individuals evaluate the moral and ethical dimensions of their own or others' personalities? I have been investigating how people think about their own or others' most 'moral' or 'immoral' behaviors. I have also been investigating the sociometry of character assessments in small groups in order to determine the 'locus' of morality, shed light on a prevalent self serving bias for morality, and articulate the conditions under which 'halo' and 'pitchfork' effects emerge. 

Finally, I am interested in the various motivational changes individuals undergo throughout their daily lives--playful one moment, serious the next; compliant one moment, defiant the next; affection-oriented one moment, power-oriented the next; and so on. The provocative idea is that intra-individual differences can be as profound as inter-individual differences. The person making a New Year's resolution is very different from the same person breaking that resolution. The person climbing into a rollercoaster car wants something quite different than the same person climbing into a dentist chair. 

Frey, K. P., & Eagly, A. H. (1993). Vividness can undermine the persuasiveness of messages. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 32-44. 

Frey, K. P., & Smith, E. R. (1993). Beyond the actor's traits: Forming impressions of actors, targets, and relationships based on social behaviors. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 486-493. 

My research is in developmental psychopathology and focuses on questions related to diagnosis, assessment, and treatment of childhood disorders. Three areas are emphasized in our current research. First, our work with antisocial behavior focuses on children who engage in aggression, theft, truancy, firesetting and related behaviors. We are interested in developing effective child- and family-based interventions to improve current child functioning and to controvert the poor long-term prognosis. Identifying effective treatments requires research designed to understand the nature and scope of child dysfunction, parent and family factors (e.g., stress, clinical dysfunction) that contribute to adjustment, and contextual factors (e.g., socioeconomic disadvantage, domestic violence) in which child dysfunction may be embedded. 

Second, our work in childhood depression examines various cognitive and experiential features associated with the dysfunction. We have focused on such domains as hopelessness, negative attributional processes, and anhedonia and their relation to specific symptoms such as suicidal attempt and ideation. Our research has developed measurement strategies for children for purposes of charting the course of depression in early development. 

Finally, our work focuses on psychotherapy more broadly by examining current child, adolescent, and adult treatment practices in use in the mental health professions, the clinical and research base of these practices, and the implications for mental health services. As part of this work, we have studied factors related to engaging children and families in treatment, risk factors associated with premature termination form treatment and factors during treatment (e.g., alliance, expectations) that can be mobilized to improve clinical outcomes. Also, we are interested in ridging the hiatus of research and practice by increasing the clinical relevance of psychotherapy research and by developing methods of evaluation for clinical use. 

Kazdin, A. E., & Kagan, J. (1994). Models of dysfunction in developmental psychopathology. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 1, 35-52. 

Kazdin, A. E., & Crowley, M. (in press). Moderators of treatment outcome in cognitively based treatment of antisocial behavior. Cognitive Therapy and Research. 

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I am interested in memory and cognition, especially in personal and social contexts, and in psychopathology. Much of my research focuses on the psychological unconscious, by which I mean mental structures, processes, and states that influence experience, thought, and action outside of phenomenal awareness and voluntary control. For example, I have studied implicit expressions of memory in hypnosis, surgical anesthesia, and sleep, and I have extended the implicit-explicit distinction to phenomena of perception, problem-solving, and emotion. While most of my research involves student subjects, I am also interested in implicit-explicit interactions in the aged, and in neuropsychological and psychiatric patients. Further concerns within the domain of normal memory processes are recall and recognition, autobiographical memory, and concepts and categorization. Within the domain of personality and social psychology I am interested in the self as a knowledge structure, and the problem of person memory generally. With Nancy Cantor, I have been developing a "social intelligence" approach to personality, which attributes individual difference in experience, thought, and action to differences in the cognitive resources which people bring to bear on social interaction. Finally, I have retained from my clinical training an interest in experimental psychopathology, including psychological deficit and laboratory models of psychopathology. 

Kihlstrom, J. F. (1996). Consciousness and me-ness. In J. Cohen & Schooler (Eds.), Scientific approaches to the question of consciousness (pp. 451-568). Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum. 

Kihlstrom, J. F., Shames, V. A., & Dorfman, J. (1996). Intimations of memory and thought. In L. Reder (Ed.), Implicit Memory and Metacognition (pp.1-23). Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum. 

The primary focus of our laboratory is to understand the neural mechanisms by which behavioral stress influences brain and behavior.  Specifically, stress has long been known to have detrimental effects on learning and memory processes in many species, including humans.  Stress also impairs ensuing long-term potentiation (LTP) in the hippocampus--a form of synaptic plasticity and a brain structure implicated in learning and memory.  We have recently found that, in contrast to LTP, stress promotes homosynaptic long-term depression (LTD) in the hippocampus.  Moreover, the effects of stress on LTP and LTD appear to be mediated via N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors.  Thus, it is conceivable that learning and memory effects associated with stress may in part be due to the modification of LTP and LTD inducibility in the hippocampus.  Currently, we are employing a variety of behavioral paradigms (e.g., spatial, emotive and motor tasks) to systematically characterize the types of learning that are affected by stress.  Also, the possibilities of stress during early developmental period affecting hippocampal plasticity and learning, as well as stress affecting synaptic plasticity in other brain structures, is being investigated.  The other main interest in our lab is to examine learning and memory processes using mutant mice. 

Kim, J. J., Foy, M. R. & Thompson, R. F. (1996). Behavioral stress modifies hippocampal plasticity through N-methyl D-aspartate receptor activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ,U.S.A., 93, 4750-4753. 

Kim, J. J. and Thompson, R. F.  (1997).  Cerebellar circuits and synaptic mechanisms involved in classical eyeblink conditioning.  Trends in Neurosciences, 20, 177-181. 

My work focuses on the study of adolescent psychopathology, particularly on problems of female adolescents, including depression, school dropout, pregnancy, delinquency, drug use, high risk sexual activity, etc. Most recently, I have been involved in conducting a longitudinal study of predictors of the heterogeneity of outcomes for Black and Hispanic adolescent mothers and their children. I also continue to be particularly interested in problems of intersubjectivity or reciprocal understanding in relationships, and with my students, am investigating difficulties in mother-daughter and adolescent mother-child interactions. Finally, I am currently beginning research looking at gender differences in the pathways linking depressive experiences to internalizing and externalizing problems in adolescents. 

Leadbeater, B. J., Blatt, S., & Quinlan, D. M. (1995). Gender-linked vulnerabilities to depressive symptoms, stress, and problem behaviors in adolescents. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 5, 1-29. 

Leadbeater, B. J., & Bishop, S. (1994). Longitudinal predictors of behavior problems in preschool children of Black and Puerto Rican adolescent mothers. Child Development, 65, 638-648. 

Our current interests focus especially on accounting for the content and processes of natural thought systems as manifested in one's free associations about possible occurrences or in one's flowing descriptions of significant domains of experience (e.g., of one's self, one's family, the future, etc.) We investigate determinants of what is salient in thought content and how these thought contents are organized, as manifested both in their static structure (the interrelations among the thought contents at a given moment in time) and their dynamic functioning (how a change induced at one point in the thought system spreads to produce immediate or delayed changes at other points in the system). We are currently focusing on thought systems' positive-negative asymmetries in both the cognitive (present-absent) and the affective (desirable-undesirable) senses. We are also studying how and why a wide variety of rhetorical tropes affect the perception and impact of persuasive communications. Our language studies are on identifying a psychologically significant typology of verbs and on accounting for seemingly arbitrary word-order regularities. 

McGuire, W. J. & McGuire, C. V. (1996). Enhancing self-esteem by directed-thing tasks: cognitive and affective positivity asymmetries. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 1117-1125. 

McGuire, W. J. (1996). Going beyond the banalities of bubbapsychology: a perspectivist social psychology. C.McGarty & A. Haslam (Eds), The message of social psychology. Oxford: Blackwell pp 221-237. 

Language acquisition seems to be a balancing act between innate predispositions and linguistic input. The central focus of my research is to study this process in order to discover more precisely what about one's native language is learned and how this is accomplished. Towards this goal, I have been using a language comprehension 

paradigm (preferential looking to video targets), which facilitates the investigation of linguistic understanding in children who are not very verbal and not mature enough for traditional language tasks. I use the paradigm to simulate natural word learning scenarios, so as to determine the influence of linguistic input and extralinguistic environment. In addition, I look at verb acquisition across languages (e.g., Spanish, Chinese) asking when language-specific factors begin to play a role. 

Naigles, L. & Gelman, S. A. (1995). Overextensions in comprehension and production, revisited: A study of dog, cat, & cow. Journal of Child Language, 22, 19-46. 

Naigles, L. (1996). The use of multiple frames in verb learning via syntactic bootstrapping. Cognition, 58, 221-251. 

My research focuses on the Cognitive Neuroscience of Human Memory. I have two primary research projects. The first examines the role of the hippocampus in human memory and specifically is concerned with the validity of theories derived from animal research when applied to human amnesia. The second looks at the effects of emotion and arousal on memory. I hope to discover if there are separate mnemonic processes involved in some or all types of emotional learning and the neuroanatomical basis for these separate processes. In addition to memory studies with normal subjects, I use two techniques to examine the relation between brain function and behavior in humans: 1) studies with brain damaged patients, and 2) functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) with normal subjects. Most projects begin with studying cognitive processing in normal subjects to help understand the behavior in question. This is often followed up with patient research, in which I attempt to disassociate mnemonic processes that may be functionally separate while also providing insight into the organization of the human brain. 

With the fMRI studies, I try to find converging evidence with the brain damage studies and further localize the brain areas involved in specific behaviors. By combining traditional cognitive techniques with brain studies, I hope to get a better understanding of human memory from the behavioral and neuroanatomical perspectives. 

Phelps, E. A., Phillips, R. G., & Gazzaniga, M.S. (1994). Relational processing and hippocampal function. In J. Delacour (Eds.), The memory system of the brain. River Edge, NJ: World Scientific. 

LaBar, K. S., LeDoux, J. E., Spence, D. D., & Phelps, E. A. (1995). Impaired fear conditioning following unilateral temporal lobectomy in humans. Journal of Neuroscience, 15, 6846-6855. 

My students and I explore cognitive development in human infants, particularly the development of representation as reflected in memory and expectations. Very young infants have some capacity for representation (e.g., they recognize familiar stimuli), but it is not until late in the first year that infants become able to bring prior experience to bear on a present problem (e.g., finding an object that they saw hidden) or use that information to predict an up-coming state of affairs (e.g., the consequences of a particular action). We attempt to describe and understand developmental change in infant ability in these domains by using laboratory-based measures of infant motor, visual, and facial response in longitudinal and cross-sectional research designs. Our theoretical stance is eclectic but is grounded in contemporary thought on the philosophy of mind and research on the biology of brain. Typical research topics include : behaviors suggesting future-oriented processing or intentional action, infant perception of temporal intervals, memory and its relation to neural maturation, the vocabulary burst and other transitions in lexical development, and the intension and extension of children's categories. 

I also work on several other topics within infant development: (1) The causes and consequences of individual differences in parent perception of infant intentionality. (2) Premonitory symptoms of Tourette Syndrome and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. (3) Social policy and health issues relevant to infants. 

Hofstadter, M. & Reznick, J. S. (1996). Response modality affects human infant delayed-response performance. Child Development, 67, 646-658. 

Reznick, J. S. (1994). In search of infant expectation. In M. Haith, J. Benson, B. Pennington, & R. Roberts (Eds.), The Development of future-oriented processes (pp.39-59). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

The program of research conducted in my laboratory concerns two general issues in social/personality psychology: (a) the psychological significance and function of human moods and emotions and (b) the application of principles derived from research in social/personality psychology to the promotion of health protective behaviors. 

My research program on mood and emotion is focused on the psychological consequences of feeling states. The goal is to specify the processes by which affect influences thought and action. I view emotions as organizing processes that enable individuals to think and behave adaptively. This perspective can be contrasted with a more traditional one that sees affect as a disorganized interruption of mental activity that must be minimized or controlled. A conceptual model called Emotional Intelligence provides the framework that unifies our work. This perspective emphasizes the strategies that people learn in order to appraise and express their emotions accurately, understand the feelings of other people, regulate their emotions and the feelings of other people, and use emotion to motivate, plan, and achieve in life. 

Most of our research attention in the health promotion area concerns the effectiveness of interventions designed to promote prevention and early detections behaviors for cancer and HIV/AIDS. The adoption of these health behaviors often depends on the persuasiveness of a public service announcement, brochure, print advertisement, educational program, or communication from a health professional, and appeals aimed at persuading individuals to perform a particular health behavior can be framed in different ways, emphasizing relevant gains or losses. Gain-framed messages present the benefits that are accrued through adopting the behavior. Loss-framed messages convey the risks of not adopting the requested behavior. Although these two kinds of messages convey essentially the same information, in certain circumstances, one may be much more persuasive than the other. Much of our present research investigates the role of framing in developing maximally persuasive health-relevant messages. 

Singer, J. A., & Salovey, P. (1993). The remembered self: Emotion and memory in personality. New York: The Free Press. 

Rothman, A. J., & Salovey, P. (in press). Shaping perceptions to motivate healthly behavior: The role of message framing. Psychological Bulletin. 

At the most general level, the focus of my work is the biological basis of learning and memory. To pursue this interest experimentally, I have chosen to concentrate on the behavioral physiology of the hippocampal formation, which is known to be critically involved in memory functions. 

One particular type of behavior which is dependent on the hippocampal region is spatial learning. The goal of our work in the laboratory is to try to understand how the hippocampal formation accomplishes its role in this type of learning. We use two main approaches for this. First, we study the spatial correlates of the activity of individual neurons in the hippocampal formation as animals navigate through an environment. Cells in this area show two types of spatial correlate. One kind of cell fires in a location-specific manner, so that it provides an ongoing indication of where the animal is located within an environment. Another cell type fires as a function of the animal's directional heading within an environment. Our work on these cells is aimed at discovering the sensory and mnemonic determinants of these spatial signals.  The second aspect of the work is to develop neural network simulations of these cells, based on the  empirical data. These simulations are used to test theories about how the locational and directional signals are  generated. 

Sharp, P. E. , Blair, H. T., Etkin, D., & Tzanetos, D. B. (1995). Influences of vestibular and visual motion information on the spatial firing patterns of hippocampal place cells. Journal of Neuroscience, 15, 173-189. 

Sharp, P. E. (1996). Multiple spatial/behavioral correlates for cells in the rat postsubiculm: Multiple regression analysis and comparison to other hippocampal areas. Cerebral Cortex, 6, 238-259. 

Conscious experience as reflected in an ongoing stream of thought, fantasies, and daydreams, interior monologues, and the more general issues of imagination, emotion, and nocturnal dreaming are features of the human personality to which my research has been devoted. The research I direct strives to move beyond clinical anecdote and reports of individual introspection towards development of systematic, rigorous, replicable methodologies that can address these seemingly evanescent characteristics of human behavior. Studies developed in this area range from psychometric, normative questionnaire approaches through laboratory procedures using signal detection methods and psychophysiological measurement and to studies of the determinants of the content and structure of ongoing thought following stress or other forms of affective arousal. Questions concerning the early childhood origins of adult imagination have led to studies of children's play and to the effects of television-viewing or family communication styles on children's cognition, emotions, and aggressive behavior. The role of imagery processes in various forms of psychotherapy, in overcoming creative blocks, and in the relationship of personality patterns such as repression to emotional arousal and physical health have also been explored. 

Singer, J. L., & Bonanno, G. A. (1990). Personality and private experience: Individual differences in consciousness and in attention to subjective phenomena. In L. Pervin, (Ed.), Handbook of personality. New York: Guilford Press. 

Singer, D. G., & Singer, J. L. (1990). The house of make-believe: Children's play and the developing imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 

My research group is concerned with problems of human intelligence, broadly defined. Our work bridges the areas of cognitive, developmental, and social psychology. We study a range of intellectual functions, such as reasoning, problem solving, decision making, judgment, creativity, styles of learning, and concept attainment. Examples of particular current projects are matching of instruction and assessment with patterns of abilities, effectiveness of various kinds of thinking-based instruction, tacit knowledge for leadership effectiveness, the nature of wisdom, information-processing bases of second-language aptitude, and teachers' mental models of student abilities. We also have active collaborations in Israel, Tanzania, France, Norway, and Spain. Although the projects of various group members are interrelated, each student carves out his or her own unique niche of research. I am also interested in other areas of research, especially love and close relationships. Here, we are studying issues such as people's conceptions of love, the growth and decline of love over the course of relationships, and the structure of love in different kinds of relationships. The members of my group are interested in issues of both theory and application, and many of our interactions concern issues of how to take the results of laboratory investigations and apply them in the everyday world. 

Sternberg, R. J. , & Lubart, T. I. (1995). Defying the crowd. New York: Free Press. 

Sternberg, R. J. (1996). Successful intelligence. New York: Simon & Schuster. 

My research is aimed at the development of a quantitative mechanistic theory of elementary learning, including habituation, sensitization and associative learning. The present theory (SOP) and its provisional extension (AESOP) are primarily based upon behavioral data from well-characterized animal learning preparations and are most germane to such circumstances. However, they are also intended to be in contact with the neurobiological data from various model systems that are currently being exploited in investigations of the architectural and cellular bases of learning and memory (e.g., eyelid conditioning in the rabbit and gill-withdrawal modification in Aplysia, respectively). And they are in line with "connectionist" network models that are receiving considerable attention in Artificial Intelligence, so that certain of the elementary mechanisms proposed (e.g., the so-called delta rule) have been usefully incorporated in various parallel distributed processing models of complex human cognition. 

A research focus at the present time is on the different mechanisms that may be involved in the modification of relatively-specific "reflex" tendencies versus relatively-diffuse "modulatory" processes. Both are prominent products of Pavlovian conditioning but can be dissociated by the differential influence of the temporal parameters of training, as well as by various surgical and pharmacological interventions. Understanding the manner in which the two mechanisms interact may provide explanation for a challenging class of theoretical problems known as "occasion setting" and yield corresponding insights regarding the control of certain addictive behaviors. 

Wagner, A. R., & Brandon, S. E. (1989). Evolution of a structured connectionist model of Pavlovian conditioning (AESOP). In S.B. Klein & Mowrer (Eds.), Contempory learning theories. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. 

Wagner, A. R., & Donegan, N. H. (1989). Some relationships between a computational model (SOP) and neural circuit for Pavlovian (rabbit eyeblink) conditioning. In R.D. Hawkins & G.H. Bower (Eds.), The psychology of learning and motivation: Vol. 23, Computational models of learning in simple neural systems, Orlando: Academic Press. 

My research interests falls squarely in the areas of attitude change and social cognition. I take a social cognitive approach to investigate factors that influence the amount and nature of information processing activity (e.g., mood states of recipients of persuasive messages, functional match between persuasive messages and attitude bases etc.). Much of this work focuses on biases that can be created in people's thoughts and perceptions and on the steps that people sometimes take in attempts to rid their thoughts and perceptions of perceived biases. I am also interested in the role of cognitive elaboration as a central factor determining the extent to which attitudes (and other information-processing outputs) last over time and impact other cognitive elements. 

Wegener, D. T., & Petty, R. E. (1995). Flexible correction processes in social judgment: The role of naive theories in corrections for perceived bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 36-51. 

Wegener, D. T., Petty, R. E., & Smith, S. M. (1995). Positive mood can increase or decrease message scrutiny: The hedonic contingency view of mood and message processing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 5-15. 

My research focuses on the integration of cognitive-behavioral and interpersonal models for the assessment, etiology, and treatment of depression and marital discord. I am particularly interested in the intimate (e.g., marital) relationships of depressed individuals. For example, I am conducting longitudinal research investigating how marital discord in general, and marital interaction in particular, may interact with biological and/or personality vulnerabilities to influence the development, maintenance, and remission of depression. Additionally, I am interested in identifying cognitive vulnerabilities for depression, and I am currently conducting research on constructs such as hopelessness and self- and other-schemata (i.e., cognitive representations about how people view themselves and significant others in their lives). 

Besides my interests in basic research, I have interest in applied research, and I am currently evaluating the process and outcome of cognitive-behavioral and marital therapies for depression and marital discord. 

Whisman, M. A., Miller, I. W., Norman, W. H., & Keitner, G. I. (1995). Hopelessness depression in depressed inpatients: Symptomatology, patient characteristics, and outcome. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 19, 263-284. 

Whisman, M. A. (1993). Mediators and moderators of change in cognitive therapy of depression. Psychological Bulletin, 114, 248-265. 

My research area is anxiety and fear. I study excessive, pathological fear as well as normal processes of fear acquisition and extinction. In research on anxiety disorders, I study individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder, and social phobia to better understand etiology, maintenance, and treatment of these disorders. I am especially interested in social cognitive, and behavioral factors involved in the development of anxiety disorders, as well as the role of these factors in the process and outcome of psychotherapy. My students and I are involved in projects to expand evaluation of schemata in anxiety, with an eye toward testing cognitive formulations of social phobia and other disorders. Currently, I am working on several projects examining the role of self-focused attention in social anxiety and social performance. In addition to these topics in excessive fear, I also study aspects of normal fear. One of my interests is in normal types of compulsive behavior, such as superstitions, irrational contamination fears, and overvalued responsibility. I have also studied cognitive and personality aspects of sex differences in fear responding. 

Woody, S. (1996). Effects of focus of attention on social phobics' anxiety and social performance. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105, 61-69. 

Rachman, S., Thordaarson, D. S., Shafran, R., &Woody, S. R. (1995). Perceived responsibility: Structure and significance. Behavior Research and Therapy, 33, 779-784.

We have spent over three decades studying motivational determinants of children's performance and the influence of life circumstances on children's behavior. This work includes the effects of socialization settings, treatment regimens, intervention programs, and family factors. Much of our research has focused on cognitive and social-emotional development, particularly in children who are mentally retarded or from lower-income families. We have approached the study of MR from a developmental perspective, arguing that the majority of retarded persons are normal in the sense that their intellectual functioning follows the same steps and processes as the rest of the population. We have demonstrated that in many cases the attenuated functioning associated with retardation (over that expected by a general intellectual delay) is due to motivational factors rather than to a circumscribed defect. Our empirical and theoretical journeys have led to our efforts to redefine mental retardation in terms of intelligence alone. We are also working to apply the developmental approach to psychopathology in retarded and nonretarded persons. 

Another major branch of study is the impact of social action programs on child and family life. Yale's Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy trains students to do policy analyses by joining the areas of social science research and policy formation. Current projects which inform policy range over such areas as infant care leaves, child care, teenage mothers, mainstreaming, assessments of intervention programs, improvement of the nations's Head Start program, the wisdom of early schooling, the causes and prevention of child abuse, family support programs, and the impact of welfare reform on children. 

Zigler E. & Styfco, S. J. (Eds.). (1993). Head Start and beyond: A national plan for extended childhood intervention. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. 

Luthar, S. S., Doernberger, C. H. & Zigler E. (1993). Resilience is not a unidimensional construct: Insights from a prospective study of inner-city adolescents. Development and Psychopathology, 5, 703-717. 

Our research is focused on the mechanisms by which the body temperature of endothermic mammals is regulated. These include both behavioral and autonomic processes. Thermal stimuli in the environment, which perturb the body's thermal homeostasis, are of particular significance. Prior research on conventional radiant and convective thermal stressors stimulated our current interest in the effects of radiofrequency and microwave radiation on thermoregulatory processes. We have determined the microwave (2450 MHz and 450 MHz radiation) thresholds for the alteration of thermoregulatory behavior in nonhuman primates. We have determined tolerance levels of experimental animals exposed to microwave fields at both frequencies in cold, thermoneutral and warm environments. Our current studies feature pulsed as well as continuous wave fields and evaluation of microwave exposure in febrile animals. A computerized mathematical model of the human thermoregulatory system allows us to introduce the results of our animal experiments to predict the thermoregulatory sequelae of exposure to radiofrequency and microwave radiation in humans. For example, we can predict the tolerance of human patients to radiofrequency radiation during clinical magnetic resonance imaging. Other current studies evaluate human perception of radiofrequency fields with classical psychophysical methods and assess autonomic thermoregulatory responses in human subjects exposed to low-level microwave fields. 

Adair, E. R. & Berglund, L.G. (1992). Predicted thermophysiological responses of humans to MRI fields. Annuals of the New York Academy of Science, 649, 188-200. 

Adair, E. R., Adams, B. W. & Hartman, S. K. (1992). Physiological interaction processes and radiofrequency energy absorption. Bioelectromagnetics, 13, 497-512. 

My laboratory is interested in the study of electrical and metabolic activity of the human brain. We are currently involved in three areas of research: localization of sensorimotor and language-related function prior to neurosurgery; investigation of neuronal events associated with cognitive processes; investigation of sensorimotor and cognitive processes using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). My current interests include: intracranial recordings in patients being evaluated for epilepsy surgery as means of studying extrastriate cortex involved in the perception of faces, words, numbers, and color; fMRI studies of sensorimotor and extrastriate visual function. 

Allison, T., Begleiter, A., McCarthy, G., Roessler, E., Nobre, A. & Spencer, D. D. (1993). Electrophysiological studies of color processing in human visual cortex. Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, 88, 343-355. 

Allison, T., Ginter, H., McCarthy, G., Nobre, A. C., Puce, A., Luby, M. & Spencer, D. D. (1994). Face recognition in human extrastriate cortex. Journal of Neurophysiology, 71, 821-825. 

Our research interests center around the sense of taste. We are interested both in clinical taste disorders and in the genetic variations in taste abilities that make us occupy different taste worlds. Clinical problems encountered in the taste system are of two sorts: phantom tastes that cannot be abolished and taste losses. Our aim is to find ways to apply state-of-the-art psychophysical procedures to the measurement of these abnormalities. We are especially interested in groups with food problems including elderly individuals and those with bulimia. Our investigations into genetic variation show that bitter and sweet substances in particular do not taste the same to everyone. For example, saccharin tastes bitter only to some individuals while others taste it as pure sweet. Sucrose is sweet to everyone but the degree of sweetness varies. Individuals that find saccharin to be bitter also taste sucrose to be nearly twice as sweet as other substances which taste bitter to some people. We are interested in whether or not this genetic characteristic can help explain the lack of preference for milk products in some children. 

Bartoshuk, L. M., Rifkin, B., Marks, L. E., & Bars, P. (1986). Taste and aging. Journal of Gerontology, 41, 51-57. 

Bartoshuk, L. M. (1979). Bitter taste of saccharin related to the genetic ability to taste the bitter substance 6-n Propylthiouracil. Science, 205, 934-935. 

The study of cognitive-affective structures (mental representation or cognitive schema), particularly concepts of the self and of others -- how they develop normally, how they are differentially impaired in various types of psychopathology, and how they change during the psychotherapeutic process. I study mental representations through a number of different techniques, including responses to ambiguous or partially ambiguous stimuli such as ink blots and TAT cards, and as they are expressed in dreams and the spontaneous descriptions of self and significant others. A number of newly developed conceptual systems are used to analyze the content and cognitive organization of mental representations and in investigating their relationships to dimensions in normal development, psychopathology, and change in the therapeutic process. 

Blatt, S. J. (1995). Representational structures in psychopathology. In D. Cicchetti & S. Toth (Eds.), Rochester symposium on developmental psychopathology, Volume VI: Emotion, cognition, and presentation (pp. 1-33). Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. 

Blatt, S. J. (1995). The destructiveness of perfectionism: Implications for the treatment of depression. American Psychologist. 49, 1003-1020. 

The major focus of my research is on serious disorders of childhood and developmental psychopathology. The disorders include the pervasive developmental disorders (childhood autism) and associated conditions (such as language disorders); multiple tic syndromes (primarily the syndrome of Gilles de la Tourette, TS); attentional disorders; and mental retardation. With collaborators in child psychiatry, psychology, pediatrics, neurology, genetics, linguistics, analytic chemistry, and other disciplines, I have been studying the relations between biological and behavioral phenomena; neurochemical correlations; developmental transitions; effects of treatment; and dimensions of disorder or processes which cut across diagnosis. I am also engaged in studies of the emotional life of children as revealed by the methods of child psychoanalysis. 

Other investigators in the Child Study Center are engaged in research on various aspects of child and family development, including psychosomatic disorders, inner-city children and schools, custody and divorce, cognitive development, disorders, of young children, psychological assessment, vulnerability to disorders, child psychoanalysis and child therapy, and the impact of violence and trauma on children and families. 

Cicchetti, D., & Cohen, D. J. (Eds.). (1995). Developmental psychopathology. Volume I, Theory and methods, Volume 2, Risk, disorder and adaptation. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 

Cohen, D. J., Volkmar, F. R. (Eds.). (in press). Autism and pervasive developmental disorders: A handbook, 2nd Edition. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 

The long range goal of research in our laboratory is to understand the physiological bases of learning and memory. To simplify this question, our strategy is to work with a very simple behavior that is readily quantifiable and known to be altered by prior experience. In many species, including man, a loud noise elicits a startle response, which occurs very rapidly. We have determined the neural pathway that mediates acoustic startle in the rat, which consists of four synapses in the brainstem and spinal cord. 

Despite the fact that startle is so fast and has a relatively simple neural circuit, it is exquisitely sensitive to changes in the environment, to drugs, and to stimulation or removal of specific areas of the brain. Startle can also be influenced by prior learning, such as fear conditioning. Startle thus provides a brainstem and spinal reflex system that is modulated by higher brain systems. Using electrical stimulation or single unit recording in unanesthetized animals, we are determining the points within this pathway where certain environmental events, drugs, or prior learning affect neural transmission. Pathways that are involved in fear conditioning are being delineated using mechanical and chemical lesions, electrical brain stimulation, and anterograde and retrograde tracing techniques. This information is used to evaluate where drugs that alter fear or anxiety or drugs that alter learning and memory act along these pathways to produce their effects. 

Davis, M., Falls, W. A., Campeau, S., & Kim, M. (1993). Fear-potentiated startle: A neural and pharmacological analysis. Behavioral Brain Research, 58, 175-178. 

Lee, Y., Lopez, D. E., Meloni, E. G. & Davis, M. (1996). A primary acoustic startle pathway: Obligatory role of cochlear root neurons and the nucleus reticularis pontis caudalis. Journal of Neuroscience, 16, 3777-3789. 

Broadly, my interests are in the relation of psychology and humanistic studies, especially religion. I pursue this largely through the study of life-long human development, with three different emphases. One is the study of autobiographical accounts of religious persons. A second is the biographical study of prominent psychologists (and theologians) as a context for understanding their ideas, especially, now, Freud, Horney, James, and Jung (and among the theologians, Augustine and Edwards). I am especially interested in teasing out the "world view" or even what could be called the "theology" implicit in the psychologists' lives and thought (and among the theologians, their implicit psychology). Thirdly, I am interested in the development of gender. 

Dittes, J. E. (1969). The psychology of religion. In G. Lindsey & E. Aronson (Eds.), Handbook of social psychology, Vol. 5. Boston: Addison Wesley. 

Dittes, J. E. (1985). The male predicament. New York: Harper & Row. 

My major theoretical goal is to develop integrated and compatible theories of speech perception, speech production and linguistic phonology. The research on speech perception investigates how listeners recover phonological segments (consonants and vowels) from a speech signal in which information for segments is thoroughly overlapped and context-sensitive. The research on production is aimed at discovering the coordinations among speech articulators that permit literal production of consonants and vowels in the vocal tract despite the temporal overlap among them that gives rise to context-sensitivity in the acoustic speech signal. The study of phonology is meant to discover ways of understanding linguistic "competence" so that its primitive components have only characteristics that are implementable in the vocal tract. 

In a different line of research, I am investigating ways in which language performance reflects the changing base of knowledge shared between talker and listener. We are finding that at many levels of language (phonetic, lexical, syntactic) talkers reduce forms as shared knowledge grows. That is, talkers supply less information where less is needed; accordingly, when information is already foregrounded for the listener words are short durationally, lexically shorter words or phrases are used to refer and some optional syntactic markers may be omitted. We find that the patterning of reductions and elaborations itself marks episode units in a narration, and thus may provide useful information to a listener about discourse structure. 

Fowler, C. A. (1994). Invariants, specifiers, cues: An investigation of locus equations as information for place of articulation. Perception and Psychophysics, 55, 597-610. 

Fowler, C. A., & Levy, E. T. (in press). Talker-listener attunements to speech events. Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues. 

This laboratory is devoted to understanding the structural and functional organization of the prefrontal association cortex and related structures in the primate brain. The objective of these studies is to elucidate the cellular and molecular basis of cognitive processing in the primate brain. Research is conducted on macaque monkeys and involves a variety of morphological and functional techniques including anatomical tracing (e.g., autoradiography, HRP, and fluorescent dyes) immunocytochemistry and receptor autoradiography, single cell recording in behaving animals, and 2-deoxyglucose mapping of metabolic activity. Synaptic architecture and neurotransmitter properties of cortical circuits are also studied in fetal, neonatal, and adult animals to analyze development and plasticity of these circuits in the primate cerebral cortex.

Goldman-Rakic, P. S. (1987). Circuitry of primate prefrontal cortex and regulation of behavior by representational memory. In F. Plum (Ed.), Handbook of physiology, The nervous system, higher functions of the brain. Bethesda, Md: American Physiology Society. 

Goldman-Rakic, P.S. (1995). Cellular basis of working memory. Neuron , 14, 477-485. 

My colleagues and I at Haskins Laboratories are currently developing a computational model of speech production, using principles from dynamical systems theory. We base our model on a particular approach called task dynamics, which abstractly characterizes phonetically-relevant "gestures" as coordinated movements of individual vocal tract articulators, harnessed to achieve a particular phonetic task. The computational model generates patterns of movement of simulated vocal tract articulators, from a "gestural score" that specifies the temporal relations among dynamically defined gestures. From the movements of these model articulators, a time-varying vocal tract filter function is calculated, and an acoustic waveform is produced, that we can listen to. Our research involves analyzing articulatory movements produced by speakers of English to derive the abstract dynamical parameters of the gestural score. The output of the model is then tested in perceptual experiments. This articulatory dynamic model of speech production can provide the basis for a concise and principled description of variability of speech associated with changes in stress, speaking rate redundancy, and phonetic context. Because it can model speech variability from an invariant underlying structure in a principled way, we are also beginning to use the model as a basis for automatic speech recognition, by developing procedures for recovering the gestural score from the acoustic signal. 

Browman, C. P., & Goldstein, L. (1990). Tiers in articulatory phonology, with some implications for casual speech. In J. Kingston & M.E. Beckman (Eds.), Laboratory phonology I: Between the grammar and the physics of speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Browman, C., & Goldstein, L. (1992). Articulatory phonology: An overview. Phonetica, 49, 155-180. 

My central intellectual interest is self-interested motivation. I seek to understand the social, psychological, and political conditions under which self-interest manifests itself in attitudes and behavior. This interest has impelled me to study a disparate array of phenomena, ranging form whites' resistance to court-ordered school desegregation to House incumbents' propensity to raise and spend campaign money. Indeed, my current research (with Robert Abelson) on hate crime can be understood as an attempt to analyze a form of behavior that seems quite distant from instrumental motives. 

The large empirical literature on self-interest is marred by conceptually ragged and methodologically flawed research. Much of my time is spent, therefore, addressing what I see as the methodological limitations of past work. 

In this vein, I recently co-authored a book entitled Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory (Yale University Press, 1994), which takes on several large literatures in political science and sociology that purport to demonstrate the virtues of economic models of human behavior. 

Green, D. P. (1992). The price elasticity of mass preferences. American Political Science Review, 86, 128-148. 

Green, D. P., & Cowden, J. A. (1992). Who protests: Self-interest and white opposition to busing. Journal of Politics, 54, 471-496. 

My primary research interests focus on the relationship of school context factors (school climate) to children's psychoeducational development, psychosocial adjustment and school performance, with special emphasis on urban schools and African-American children. In pursuing research in this area, I have examined the impact of schooling practices on children's self-concept, social competence behavior and academic achievement. 

One of my most recent and significant undertakings in this area has been the development and national psychometric evaluation of student, parent and staff versions of a school climate scale which is being widely used throughout the United States and in some foreign countries. I have also developed a Behavior Assessment Scale for Children (BASC). 

My other interests include cross-cultural issues in child and family therapy and the impact of socio-cultural experiences on children's psychosocial and psychoeducational development. 

Comer, J. P., & Haynes, N. M. (1996). Improving Psychoeducational Outcomes for African-American Children. In Melvin Lewis (Ed.) Child and adolescent psychiatry: A comprehensive textbook. (2nd ed.) (1097-1104). Baltimore: Williams & Williams. 

Comer, J. P., & Haynes, N. M. (1996). Rallying the whole village: The Comer process for reforming education. New York: Teachers College Press. 

My main research interests focus on increasing understanding of the determinants and consequences of health behaviors and health outcomes. My current research has been directed toward a series of community-based, longitudinal studies in the realm of HIV/AIDS. My research team and I have been actively involved in several on going studies, including: (1) identifying factors that influence recruitment, adherence and retention in AIDS clinical trails; (2) identifying the behavioral and psychological consequences of HIV counseling and testing for women; (3) diasaggregating the effects of race and social class on access to health care, health behaviors and health outcomes; and (4) other studies examining prevention interventions, high-risk sexual behavior, access to health care, and health outcomes for persons with HIV. 

A new area within health psychology that we are beginning to develop is the study of "psychological resilience." We define resilience as the effective mobilization of individual and social resources in response to a health challenge. We will begin to explore the study of resilience theoretically, methodologically and empirically in the area of HIV disease as well as other health threats. 

Additional interests include public policy and medical education reform. Having spent five years in Washington DC (and working on Capital Hill), I have an interest in the use of social science to inform public policy. For example, access to health care and inclusion in health research--particularly among those traditionally under-represented (such as women and minorities)--is an important area for further study and policy formulation. Finally, I am currently developing medical school curricula to integrate social and behavioral sciences into medical education at Yale. 

Rodin, J., & Ickovics, J. R. (1990). Women's health: Review and research agenda as we approach the 21st Century. American Psychologist, 45, 1018-1034. 

Ickovics, J. R., Morrill, A. C., Beren, S.E., Walsh, U. , & Rodin, J. (1994). Limited effects of HIV counseling and testing for women: A prospective study of behavioral and psychological consequences. Journal of the American Medical Association, 272, 443-448. 

My interests are broadly in the area of health psychology and behavioral medicine. I am particularly interested in the integration of neurobiological and psychosocial models of the experience of chronic illness and associated disability and affective distress. I am also increasingly interested in the roles of the family and broader social context, as well as the role of social cognition, in the process of adaptation to chronic illness. An ongoing program of research focuses on the experience of chronic pain, with specific projects designed to evaluate predictors  of outcome of psychological treatments, the relationship between pain and depression, pain-relevant social responding in the maintenance of pain and disability, and negative cognition and pain intensity. A second line of ongoing research focuses on the identification of affective distress and health risk behaviors in primary care medical settings and associations between these variables and medical outcomes and use of the health care system. 

Banks, S. M., & Kerns, R .D. (1996). Explaining high rates of depression in chronic pain: A diathesis-stress framework. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 95-110. 

Bastone, E., & Kerns, R. D. (1996). The effects of self-efficacy and perceived social support on recovery post-CABG surgery. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 17, 324-330. 

My main interest centers on human sensory and perceptual processes. The approach is largely psychophysical, seeking to learn how the senses select, modify, modulate, and in general transform patterns of impinging stimulus energies and information and how implicit knowledge about sensory/perceptual experience is expressed in language. 

Guiding much of this research is the perspective that I call "the unity of the senses": Although the senses of vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell are specialized to respond to different kinds of stimuli and to provide differential information, nevertheless the senses also reveal profound similarities and interconnections. A main goal of the research is to uncover and elucidate general, "unitary" principles of perceptual processing, and to relate perceptual to higher-level cognitive processing. Current research is examining: mechanisms of intensity perception in different senses, effects of context and selective attention on perception, and interactions of perceptual and semantic codes in processing perceptual and linguistic information. 

Marks, L. E., Hammeal, R.J. , & Bornstein, M. H. (1987). Perceiving similarity and comprehending metaphor. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 42, No. 215, 1-91. 

Marks, L. E. (1992). The contingency of perceptual processing: Context modifies equal-loudness relations. Psychological Science, 3, 285-291. 

My research examines information processing and attentional processes in infants. Employing visual habituation procedures between 3 and 6 months and older, I am studying the effects of prenatal cocaine exposure on the development of attentional regulatory capacities. Additionally, our research program in the behavioral teratology of cocaine is studying the effects of maternal cocaine abuse on an adult's capacity to parent a child and the contribution of maternal interactions to the child's attentional capacities. Cocaine abuse influences infant development on potentially multiple levels including (1) effects on fetal brain development, (2) effects on maternal health during pregnancy and placental function, (3) the effects of cocaine use on specific parenting behaviors and more general effects mediated through increased violence, multiple foster placements, homelessness, and repeated family disruption, and (4) parental psychopathology or neuropsychiatric disorders that predate cocaine abuse (e.g., depression, attention deficit disorder) which carries both interactive and genetic risks for the child. These different levels of effect also highlight prenatal cocaine exposure as an appropriate model for studying biologic-environment interactions. 

Mayes, L. C., Graner, R. H., Bornstein, M. H., & Zuckerman, B. (1992), The problem of intrauterine cocaine exposure. Journal of the American Medical Association, 267, 406-408. 

Mayes, L. D. (1992). The effects of prenatal cocaine exposure on young children's development. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 521, 11-27. 

My research is focused on the genetics of abnormal behavior. In addition, studies have recently been initiated that are designed to examine the relative contribution of genetic and non-genetic (environmental) factors in the development of behavioral disorders in children and adults. My laboratory employs a number of different research paradigms to examine the role of genetic factors in the manifestation of behavior. Research paradigms include family, twin and prospective longitudinal studies designed to examine hypotheses of genetic and non-genetic transmission and molecular genetic paradigms designed to identify regions of the human genome where susceptibility genes might be located. 

Pauls, D. L., Alsobrook, J. P. II, Goodman, W., Rasmussen, S., & Leckman, J. F. (1995). A family study of obsessive compulsive disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry, 152, 76-84. 

Pauls, D. L., Ott, J., Paul, S.M., Allen C.R., Fann, S.C.J., Carlulli, J.P., Falls, K.M., Bouthillier, C.A., Gravius, T.C., Keith, T. P., Egeland, J. A., & Ginns, E. I. (1995). Linkage analyses of chromosome 18 markers and bipolar affective disorder in the Old Order Amish. American Journal of Human Genetics, 57, 636-643. 

My research interests include the following: Schizophrenia and psychosis: Assessment of cognitive deficits and disordered thinking; evaluation of contact/attachment with significant others; family patterns; differential diagnosis and course of illness. 

Depression: Evaluation of differences in experience of depression; measurement of interpersonal and goal-directed functioning and attitudes, quality of representation of significant others. 

Cognitive/structural development: Relationship of Kohlberg's Moral Development and Loevinger's Ego Development to psychopathology and personality. 

Blatt, S. J., D'Afflitti, J.P. & Quinlan, D. M. (1976). Experiences of depression in normal young adults. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 85, 383-389. 

Harrow, M. & Quinlan, D. M. (1985). Disordered thinking and schizophrenic psychopathology. New York: Gardiner Press. 

My current research projects reflect my interest in the cognitive, emotional, adaptive, social, and academic development of children. I am particularly interested in how these areas of development are differentially seen across numerous clinical groups of children. Also of importance in my ongoing research is the appropriateness of various assessment techniques in determining current functioning of children in all of these areas. My early work with learning disorders and treatment programs for neurologically impaired and mentally retarded children forms the basis for my current research. This has been augmented by my more recent work in adaptive behavior of individuals from birth to adulthood. This work has added a new focus to my work with children having various abilities and disabilities. We have recently been studying the mental processing, and adaptive and linguistic functioning of gifted and learning disabled children and precocious readers, as well as looking at problem solving behaviors, and adaptive functioning in groups of children with Down syndrome, non-specific mental retardation, autism, and serious psychiatric disorders. Newly developed projects include studies involving mental health needs of hearing impaired children, and neuropsychological correlates of Tourette's syndrome, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and Attention Deficit Disorders. 

In addition to our ongoing work with autistic children, we have begun neuropsychological, genetic and neuroanatomical study of Asperger's Syndrome. 

Sparrow, S. S., & Carter, A. S. (1992). Mental retardation: Current issues related to assessment. In S. Segalowitz & I. Rapin (Eds.). Handbook of neuropsychology. (Vol. 6). 

Sparrow, S. S., Carter, A. S., Racusin, G., & Morris, R. (1995). Comprehensive psychological assessment through the lifespan. In D. Cohen & D. Cicchetti (Eds.), Manual of developmental psychopathology. New York: John Wiley. 

Current research interests fall into two categories: (1) Chemical Senses and Aging. Here the goal is to assess the many ways in which aging throughout the life span affects smell, taste, and the common chemical sense (chemical irritation of the nose and mouth). Already in middle age weaknesses in these modalities begin to show up, and they become more and more obvious with advancing age. The research is proceeding along several lines, including measurements of threshold, supra-threshold magnitude, odor identification ability, odor memory, adaptation and recovery from adaptation, failure to detect dangerous substances, and effects of Alzheimer's disease. (2) Somesthesis and Aging. This project concerns how features of somesthetic perception vary over the life span, including spatial acuity (as reflected in age-related deterioration of two-point threshold and error of localization), the discrimination of roughness and texture, sensitivity of the body surface to thermal stimulation, and signals for regulation of local and core body temperature. 

Stevens, J. C. & Cain, W. S. (1987). Old-age deficits in the sense of smell gauged by thresholds, magnitude matching, and order identification. Psychology and Aging, 2, 36-42. 

Stevens, J. C. (1992). Aging and spatial acuity of touch. Journal of Gerontology, 47, 35-40. 

My research focuses on the developmental psychopathology of early childhood. Disorders of special interest include autism, mental retardation, and developmental language disorders and other disorders of early childhood onset. A specific focus of this research has been on aspects of diagnosis and phenomenology in relation to social development and in relation to continuities and discontinuities in syndrome expression over the course of development. Several different research strategies have been utilized. Time-sample techniques have been used to study aspects of behavioral expression of disorder in relation to the social environment, e.g. gaze deviance in autism. Another line of research has focused on developing techniques for assessing social deficit and deviance in relation to syndrome expression and syndrome definition. Studies of diagnosis and phenomenology have also evaluated categorical and dimensional approaches to diagnosis in these disorders. A central theme of this research has been the attempt to understand how early patterns of social deviance become entrained in subsequent development. 

Volkmar, F. R., Klin, A., & Siegel, B., (1994). Field trial for autistic disorder in DSM-IV. American Journal Psychiatry, 151, 1361-1367. 

Volkmar, F. R. (Ed.). 1996. Psychoses and Persuasive Developmental Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence. 

My research concerns the impact of leadership styles on the performance of complex organizations. We are interested primarily in the role of leaders in the decision-making process. A taxonomy of alternatives has been developed varying in the amount of participation afforded subordinates in the making of decision. This taxonomy is an integral part of two research programs. The first program is aimed at the consequences of various amounts of participation for such outcomes as the quality of decisions reached, the degree of commitment to decisions, the time taken and the development of subordinates. This research supports a contingency view of leadership and in fact has lead to the development of a prescriptive model which can take the form of a computer based expert system. 

The second research program examines the extent to which leaders do in fact involve subordinates in decision-making including the joint effects of situational variables and individual differences. An integral part of this activity has been the development of a computer based technology for assessing a leader's style including the decision rules that he or she employs in deciding when and where to involve others. A current interest is the degree to which these decision rules can be modified through training. 

Vroom, V. H., & Jago, A. (1988). The new leadership: Managing participation in organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. 

Vroom, V. H., & Deci, E. L. (Eds), (1992). Management and motivation. London, England: Penguin Books.