The Department of Psychology specializes in nine areas of research: Behavioral Neuroscience, Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Decision Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, Quantitative Psychology, and Social Psychology. Learn more about each area and its faculty labs below.
Behavioral Neuroscience
- Factors influencing plasticity of brain and behavior through development and into adulthood
- Hippocampal biology and function
- Stress and the brain
- Neurogenesis and brain plasticity across the life span
- Sex-related differences in brain function
- Endocrine and immune regulation of brain and behavior
- The neurobiology of cognitive control
Behavioral Neuroscience Faculty Labs
For information about lab opportunities, please contact Liz McGinnis at mcginnis.20089@osu.edu (undergraduate students) or Mary Jones at jones.3308@osu.edu (graduate students).
Faculty: Laurence Coutellier
Researches how circuits of the prefrontal cortex regulate emotional and cognitive functions throughout the lifespan, as well as factors that can alter these circuits and their implications in neuropsychiatric and neurological diseases.
Faculty: Liz Kirby
Researches the role of hippocampal neural stem and progenitor cells (NSPCs) in modulating the hippocampal response to environmental stimuli.
Faculty: Kathryn Lenz
Conducts research on how the brain develops and changes during flexible periods of life: before birth, during childhood, adolescence, and pregnancy.
Faculty: Benedetta Leuner
Conducts preclinical research to address issues and questions that are specific to the female brain and women’s brain health.
Clinical Psychology
- The treatment of mood and personality disorders using cognitive behavioral therapies
- Biobehavioral responses to cancer diagnosis and treatment
- Testing and dissemination of psychological treatments for cancer patients
- Psychological and behavioral adaptation to chronic health problems
- Effects of exercise on psychological and cognitive functioning
- Neuroplasticity in healthy aging and neurological disorders
- Mindfulness and cognitive functioning in older adults
Clinical Psychology Faculty Labs
For information about lab opportunities, please contact Liz McGinnis at mcginnis.20089@osu.edu (undergraduate students) or Mary Jones at jones.3308@osu.edu (graduate students).
Faculty: Jennifer Bogner
Faculty: Scott Hayes
Examines modifiable lifestyle variables that are associated with optimal cognitive performance and brain health, including aerobic fitness, strength, spatiotemporal gait metrics, balance, sleep and nutrition.
Faculty: Ruchika Prakash
Trains the next generation of clinical scientists devoted to the study of evidence-based lifestyle interventions, neuropsychology and neuroimaging.
Faculty: Daniel Strunk
Studies the role of cognition in abnormal emotional states, including in the etiology and treatment of depression.
Faculty: Nicholas Breitborde
Faculty: Jennifer Cheavens
Conducts research on mood and personality, with projects on kindness, hope, emotion regulation, social media and interpersonal emotion regulation.
Faculty: Jasmeet Hayes
Uses cognitive neuroscience techniques, such as MRI, to conduct research on the impact of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and psychological stress on the brain and overall health outcomes.
Faculty: Cynthia Gerhardt
Faculty: Janice Kiecolt-Glaser
Faculty: Barbara Andersen
Conducts innovative research on the bio-behavioral aspects of cancer in order to improve the psychological well-being and health of cancer patients.
Faculty: Aubrey Moe
Faculty: Kristen Carpenter
Conducts research on risk factors for sexual and psychological maladjustment in gynecologic and breast cancer patients during various stages of diagnosis, treatment and survivorship.
Cognitive Psychology
- Experimental, brain imaging, and model-based approaches to perception, memory, decision making, action, and language
- Modeling decision processing in memory, perception, and numeracy
- How our visual systems create our stable perception of the world
- Neuroimaging (fMRI) studies examining how we value and choose things
- The creation of biologically plausible network models of human cognition
- How we control our attention in complex tasks
- How the auditory system solves the challenges of understanding spoken language
Cognitive Psychology Faculty Labs
For information about lab opportunities, please contact Liz McGinnis at mcginnis.20089@osu.edu (undergraduate students) or Mary Jones at jones.3308@osu.edu (graduate students).
Faculty: Roger Ratcliff and Gail McKoon
Conducts research on the processes underlying representation and decision making, with current focuses on memory, perception and numeracy.
Faculty: Richard Jagacinski
Investigates the cognitive processes underlying action, such as attention, perception and memory, and develops new measurement techniques and mathematical models so that these dynamic processes can be understood in greater detail.
Faculty: Andrew Leber
Investigates the neural and cognitive factors that behind flexible control of behavior.
Faculty: Alexander Petrov
Faculty: Mark Pitt
Conducts research on the brain mechanisms engaged in verbal communication, particularly those involved in recognition.
Faculty: Brandon Turner
Employs cognitive models to investigate how the brain produces behavior.
Faculty: Julie Golomb
Investigates how the brain perceives and codes objects and their spatial locations, as well as how eye movement, shifts of attention, and other top-down factors affect these representations.
Faculty: Zeynep Saygin
Conducts research on how the human brain develops and changes with experience.
Cognitive Neuroscience
- Studying of the human mind and brain from multiple perspectives
- Special emphasis on sophisticated training in neuroimaging methods and analysis
- Research in visual perception and cognition, memory and learning, computational cognitive neuroscience, clinical cognitive neuroscience
- Research methods, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and computational modeling
Cognitive Neuroscience Faculty Labs
For information about lab opportunities, please contact Liz McGinnis at mcginnis.20089@osu.edu (undergraduate students) or Mary Jones at jones.3308@osu.edu (graduate students).
Faculty: Andrew Leber
Investigates the neural and cognitive factors that behind flexible control of behavior.
Faculty: Baldwin Way
Investigates how psychological factors trigger the immune system and how the immune system can alter emotions and decision-making.
Faculty: Dylan Wagner
Investigates how humans take disparate facts and observations about other people and weave these into complex and multidimensional character portraits, which form the basis of our person knowledge.
Faculty: Julie Golomb
Investigates how the brain perceives and codes objects and their spatial locations, as well as how eye movement, shifts of attention, and other top-down factors affect these representations.
Faculty: Scott Hayes
Examines modifiable lifestyle variables that are associated with optimal cognitive performance and brain health, including aerobic fitness, strength, spatiotemporal gait metrics, balance, sleep and nutrition.
Decision Psychology
- How cognitive, affective, and social processes influence judgment and choice
- How numeracy (numeric ability) affects real-world decisions
- How the brain represents subjective values and beliefs
- The role of attitudes in numeric judgment and choice
- How to improve self-control
- How information is interpreted and integrated in decision making
- Modeling decision making in aging and cognitive decline
Developmental Psychology
- Learning and developmental change in cognition, behavior, and the brain
- Genetic and environmental influences on brain and behavior
- Development of memory, categorization, and reasoning
- Development of numerical cognition and mathematical thinking
- How children learn language and use it to understand their world
- How children grow beyond the superficial in their social and moral understanding
Developmental Psychology Faculty Labs
For information about lab opportunities, please contact Liz McGinnis at mcginnis.20089@osu.edu (undergraduate students) or Mary Jones at jones.3308@osu.edu (graduate students).
Faculty: Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan
Studies families as a primary context for young children’s social and emotional development.
Faculty: Vladimir Sloutsky
Explores how and why cognition changes in the course of development and learning.
Faculty: Laura Wagner
Investigates how children acquire language, and in particular, how they learn about meaning.
Faculty: John E. Opfer
Faculty: Stephen Petrill
Examines the development of the cognitive processes related to language, reading and mathematics from the behavioral genetic perspective.
Faculty: John Gibbs
Conducts research on sociomoral development, prosocial behavior and complex social interactions.
Faculty: Zeynep Saigin
Conducts research on how the human brain develops and changes with experience.
Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities
- How to improve health and well-being in children and adults with intellectual disabilities, autism spectrum disorders, and other neurodevelopmental disorders
- How to best support families of people with disabilities
- How to impact the outcome and course of intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorder, and related neurodevelopmental disorders
- How to develop psychological instruments that measure core and associated features of intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorder, and other neurodevelopmental disorders
- How to treat behavior and emotional problems in children and adults who have intellectual disability, autism spectrum disorder, and related neurodevelopmental disorders
Quantitative Psychology
- Developing, evaluating and applying new quantitative methods for the analysis of psychological data
- The application of statistical models to real world problems
- Bayesean models of human cognition
Quantitative Psychology Faculty Labs
For information about lab opportunities, please contact Liz McGinnis at mcginnis.20089@osu.edu (undergraduate students) or Mary Jones at jones.3308@osu.edu (graduate students).
Faculty: Trisha Van Zandt
Explores changes to the cognitive system in response to stimuli over time.
Faculty: Andrew Hayes
Develops, evaluates, and disseminates research and practical statistical methods and tools for understanding the processes by which causal effects operate (mediation) and the circumstances, contexts or individual differences that influence the magnitude of those effects (moderation).
Social Psychology
- Automatic and deliberative attitudes: Influences on information processing, judgment, and behavior
- Increasing women’s participation in STEM disciplines
- How motivations in social interactions shape relationships, beliefs, well-being, and health
- What motivates social behavior
- Effects of the immune system and common anti-inflammatory drugs (e.g. Tylenol) on emotions, decisions, and social behavior
- How similarity in brain activity across people underlies similarity in thoughts, attitudes and beliefs
Social Psychology Faculty Labs
For information about lab opportunities, please contact Liz McGinnis at mcginnis.20089@osu.edu (undergraduate students) or Mary Jones at jones.3308@osu.edu (graduate students).
Faculty: Richard Petty and Duane Wegener
Investigates the situational and individual difference factors responsible for changes in beliefs, attitudes and behaviors.
Faculty: Russ Fazio
Investigates basic social psychological phenomena like attitude formation, attitude change and the relationship between attitudes and behavior, as well as the automatic and controlled processes that guide social behavior.
Faculty: Brittany Shoots-Reinhard
Conducts research on judgment and decision making, attitudes and persuasion, and motivation, with current projects focused on antecedents and consequences of objective and subjective numeracy, factors influencing the efficacy of risk and science communications, political polarization and driver psychology.
Faculty: Kentaro Fujita
Investigates how motivation (what we want) and cognition (how we think) interact to determine our evaluations, judgments and behavioral decisions.
Faculty: Steven Spencer
Conducts research on processes related to the self, identity and motivation, focusing in particular on how these processes affect stereotyping and prejudice.
Faculty: Baldwin Way
Investigates how psychological factors trigger the immune system and how the immune system can alter emotions and decision-making.
Faculty: Dylan Wagner
Investigates how humans take disparate facts and observations about other people and weave these into complex and multidimensional character portraits, which form the basis of our person knowledge.
Faculty: Lisa Libby
Investigates the mental processes underlying people’s subjective perceptions of the world and of themselves.