JULY 2008
Janet Hyde receives APA Award for Distinguished Service to Psychological Science

Janet Hyde been selected as a recipient of the American Psychological Association (APA) Award for Distinguished Service to Psychological Science.  This award was initiated by the APA Board of Scientific Affairs to recognize individuals who have made outstanding contributions to psychological science through their commitment to a culture of service. The award will be presented at the APA Science Leadership Conference, to be held this year on October 2-4, 2008, in Tempe, Arizona.

JULY 2008
Lyn Abramson receives APS James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award

Lyn Abramson has been chosen to receive the Association for Psychological Science's James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award for 2008-2009.  The Cattell Award is the highest honor conferred by APS.  It honors distinguished APS members for a lifetime of outstanding contributions to applied psychological research.

May 2008
Carol Ryff receives WARF appointment as Marie Jahoda Professor of Psychology
The Board of Regents has approved Carol Ryff's appointment as Marie Jahoda Professor of Psychology.  The professorship is funded by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

April 2008
Department welcomes new faculty
We are delighted to announce the recent decision of three exciting young researchers to launch their independent careers at Wisconsin. *Dr. Wen Li* is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University. Her research centers on psychological and neural mechanisms underlying emotional processing and emotion-cognition interactions in anxiety.  A current example of her work is highlighted in the adjacent news item. * Kristin Schutts* is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Mind, Brain, & Behavior Institute at Harvard University, where she studies the development of social categories and intergroup bias. *Vanessa Simmering* is completing her graduate training at the University of Iowa, in the Spatial Planning and Memory laboratory of John Spencer. She studies cognitive development within the framework of the dynamic field theory.

April 2008
Diane Gooding receives the Van Hise Outreach Award
Psychology Professor Diane Gooding was honored at this year's 2008 Faculty Distinguished Teaching Awards Ceremony and Reception on Tuesday, April 22 at the Fluno Center for Executive Education. Professor Gooding received The Van Hise Outreach Award.

 

April 2008
Study shows compassion meditation changes the brain
Can we train ourselves to be compassionate? A new study suggests the answer is yes. Cultivating compassion and kindness through meditation affects brain regions that can make a person more empathetic to other peoples' mental states, say Prof. Richard Davidson and first author Antoine Lutz. Read more

April 2008
Negligent, attentive mouse mothers show biological differences

In mice, child neglect is a product of both nature and nurture, according to a new study co-authored by Prof. Anthony Auger. As a possible model for human child neglect, these mice offer a valuable opportunity to investigate the biological and behavioral bases of naturally occurring maternal neglect.

April 2008
More accolades for Wisconsin clinical psychology
In US News and World Report’s latest ranking of Best Graduate Schools, the University of Wisconsin-Madison shares a 3-way tie for top-ranked program in clinical psychology. 

April 2008
"Emotion Makes Nose a Sharper Smeller"
Dr. Wen Li, who will join our faculty later this year, has recently published a remarkably sophisticated investigation of the neural basis of learning about aversive stimuli. For more details, see the full article at Science Magazine.

February 2008
“Psychology gets undergraduate research down to science”
“Choices, choices. In every undergraduate major, a time comes around a student’s junior year to explore different academic specialties within a degree program, moving up the pyramid from general education to refined focus. But in the Department of Psychology, those choices aren’t limited to the classroom.” Click here to see story in Wisconsin Week.

January 2008
John Curtin to receive Distinguished Scientific Award

John Curtin has been selected to receive the 2008 American Psychological Association (APA) Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in the area of psychopathology. 

November 2007
"Study pinpoints factors for early sex"

A study by graduate student Myeshia Price and Professor Janet Hide indicates that there's a "recipe" that raises the odds of a teen starting sex early, and the more risky ingredients in a child's life - for example, not feeling close to parents, low self-esteem and lots of TV - the more likely he is to be sexually active by age 15. The results of the study, presented at the recent conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, were featured in this story in USA Today.

October 2007
Madison Magazine names Professor Richie Davidson "Person of the Year"
"Richard Davidson has known all along this is what he wanted to do. Years before he came to Madison. Years before there was such a thing as an MRI. Years before he'd been chosen as one of Time magazine's one hundred most influential people or had been summoned to present his work to the Nobel Committee. Years before any of these things, a very young Richie Davidson knew he wanted to understand what goes on in our heads". Click here to see the full article.


September 2007
Over a decade at #1

The just-released data from the National Science Foundation's report on "Total and federally financed R&D expenditures in psychology ... ranked by FY 2004 total " (the most current data available), ranks the UW-Madison's Department of Psychology where it as been in these rankings since 1995 -- #1. In 2004 our total R&D expeditures of over $29 million topped all other departments of psychology by a factor approaching 2.0 (with the exception of Penn State, all campuses, with $18.5 million), as did the figure of $22.9 million corresponding to the federally financed portion (NYU and Penn State come in next at around $12 million). This ranking is all the more remarkable when one considers that it is accomplished with a faculty of only half the size or less that most of the remainder of the top 25 in this ranking. The full data can be found in table #58 of the NSF's report on Academic Research and Development Expenditures.

May 2007