A student chooses a major advisor when she declares her major at the end of the sophomore year. The major advisor will approve her programs and monitor her progress in the major during the junior and senior years. Psychology majors may select an advisor on their own or in consultation with the Department Representative.
The advisor must be a full-time faculty member or designated advisor. A form to declare a major officially can be obtained from the Registrar; this form requires the signature of the Departmental Representative, Professor
Lisa Son, 415F Milbank Hall.
The choice of a major advisor is based on a variety of criteria. It could be a professor the student likes or has taken a course with; it could be a professor whose specialty or area of research is intellectually agreeable to the student. The student is permitted to change advisers.
If the student has selected an area of psychology on which to concentrate as an undergraduate at Barnard or in graduate study, it can be beneficial to choose an advisor whose expertise lies in the same area. It is not imperative, however, that the advisor's area of interest coincide with the student's. Psychology faculty members are familiar with the broad range of sub-disciplines within psychology and will often be able to provide guidance in areas other than their own, or can direct the student to other faculty or to colleagues who can provide further assistance.
Students whose adviser goes on leave should choose another adviser as soon as possible, in consultation with the
Department Representative.
Listed below are the areas of research and academic interest of the full-time psychology faculty and advisors, as well as their offices and phone numbers.
(Fall 2009 - Spring 2010)
Professor Peter Balsam's general area of interest lies in learning and cognition. He has an active research program investigating how animals learn about time and use it to guide behavior. He also studies the neural mechanisms that underlie this capacity.
Office: 415H // Phone: 854-5312 // Email: balsam@columbia.edu
Professor Joshua Davis
studies emotion. In particular,
his work deals with understanding how our emotional
experiences arise and how we can change them. His
primary line of research addresses the role that bodily
states and movements play in determining the emotions we
feel. His second line of research focuses on the
connection between mental imagery and emotional experience.
His methods include social psychological,
psychophysiological, and neuroimaging techniques.
Office: 415N // Phone: 854-6989 // Email:
jdavis@barnard.edu
Professor Larry Heuer's research focuses on the
psychology of procedural fairness. Among the questions being
studied are: What criteria are employed by people to decide if
they have been fairly treated? And, why do those criteria
matter? Current projects include studies comparing the meaning
of fairness among decision makers versus decision recipients
(e.g., judges versus litigants; cops versus civilians).
Department Chair
Office: 415K // Phone: 854-7507 // Email: lbh3@columbia.edu
Professor Alexandra Horowitz
is interested in meta-cognition
(including theory of mind) and animal cognition -- and in
the overlap of these fields. To that end, she has
looked at what the play and behavior of domestic dogs
reveals about their understanding of their play partners'
mind. She also studies attributions of mental states
to others in humans, including anthropomorphisms.
ON LEAVE FALL 2009
Office: 14A // Email:
ahorowit@barnard.edu
Professor Tovah Klein's general research area is understanding influences of parents on children's early development. She has looked at the role of parents in children's early peer relationship as well as how parenting affects the outcomes of young children directly affected by the WTC disaster. A current study addresses parenting young children, based on 200 interviews with mothers and fathers. Topics addressed include work and family issues, decisions made about working once they become parents, challenges and pleasures, and the transition to parenting.
Office: 412 // Phone: 854-5274 // Email: tklein@barnard.edu
Professor Koleen McCrink's research focuses on the development of numerical cognition from infancy through adulthood. Specifically, she is interested in how we are able to not only represent different amounts, but also perform operations over these representations. By studying why and how infants, children, and adults perform mathematical operations, we can learn about the cognitive architecture of the mind- and how this changes as a function of experience, maturation, and culture.
Office: 415J // Phone: 854-8893 // Email: kmccrink@barnard.edu
Professor Joshua New's research focuses on human visual cognition – how a host of perceptual and cognitive mechanisms can all function together to provide us an immediate yet richly interpreted experience of the world. He studies how these psychological processes have each been shaped by ancient biological problems and priorities. Some of his present interests include why some things like spiders and direct eye gaze so easily capture our attention, why time can appear to slow down during dangerous events, and how the visual system can hide injuries to itself (blind spots) from awareness.
Office: 415D // Phone: 854-3581 // Email: jnew@barnard.edu
Professor Jennifer Pardo studies some of the social and situational constraints on spoken communication. In particular, she examines the patterns of phonetic variation that arise as a result of language use in different conversational settings.
Office: 415O // Phone: 854-8601 // Email: jsp2003@columbia.edu
Professor Kara Pham's
general area of research is in behavioral neuroscience, with
emphasis on stress, fear learning, and hippocampal
neurogenesis. She has also conducted studies on
developmental neurobiology and addiction.
Office: 415L // Phone: 854-5734 // Email:
kpham@barnard.edu
Professor Eshkol Rafaeli’s two
areas of research are relationships and affective
experience. In the former, he is examining ways of improving
the skillfulness of support offered by partners, and is
studying the processes by which supportive and hindering
acts exert their effect in committed couples. In the latter,
he studies how affect is organized, how different components
of it fluctuate over time, and how these different
components behave in both distressed and non-distressed
groups.
ON LEAVE AY 09-10
Phone: 854-7938 // Email: erafaeli@barnard.edu
Professor Robert Remez studies healthy human adults, in particular, the way individuals of this exotic species communicate with one another. His experiments usually examine a psychological aspect of speaking and listening to speech, and sometimes incorporate sounds produced by computers, musicians, twins, and Brooklynites.
Office: 415C // Phone: 854-4247 // Email: remez@columbia.edu
Professor Russell Romeo's research interests are primarily in developmental behavioral neuroscience. Using animal models, his work focuses on how gonadal sex hormones and adrenal stress hormones influence the pubertal maturation of the nervous system and behavior. He is also interested in how adverse experiences early in development may lead to negative behavioral, emotional and physiological outcomes in adulthood.
Office: 415B // Phone: 854-5903 // Email: rromeo@barnard.edu
Professor Ann Senghas’s area of specialty is language development. Her research investigates the manner in which young children learn to understand and to produce language. Her current projects examine a developing language which is taking its form from the innovations of young learners, a sign language produced by a community of deaf children in Nicaragua. ON LEAVE FALL 2009
Office: 415G // Phone: 854-0115 // Email: asenghas@barnard.edu
Professor Sue Riemer Sacks studies transitions. Her areas of research are the transition from student to teacher, from pre-adolescence to adolescence, and the effects of mentoring on new teachers. The particular focus of her current work is on urban adolescents, especially middle and high school students and their attitudes toward science.
Office: 336 Milbank // Phone: 854-2117 // Email: ssacks@barnard.edu
Professor Rae Silver's research area is physiological psychology, with a special interest in anatomy and behavioral endocrinology. The work focuses on hormonal control of reproductive behavior and on circadian rhythms in behavior. One line of research focuses on sex differences in circadian parental behavior of birds. Another line of inquiry involves the use of brain transplantation techniques to study the function of the neural clock in hamsters.
ON LEAVE FALL 2009
Office: 415 I // Phone: 854-5531 // Email: qr@columbia.edu
Professor Lisa Son’s general interest lies in human and animal learning and memory, with a special interest in metacognition.
She currently investigates the monitoring and control of
study strategies in human behavior --both adults and young
children-- and the monitoring ability in monkeys.
Department Representative
Office: 415 F // Phone: 854-0114 // Email: lson@barnard.edu
Professor Steve Stroessner is interested in inter-group relations. He studies how social categorization affects perceptions of and behavior toward group members. One series of studies attempts to identify how members of ethnic and gender groups are spontaneously categorized. Another series of studies has focused on how one's moods and emotions affect cognitive processes underlying stereotyping.
ON LEAVE FALL 2009
Office: 415D // Phone: 854-8272 // Email: ss233@columbia.edu
Professor Barbara Woike studies how people's personalities influence their perception and understanding of the social world. One line of inquiry concerns the complexity of information processing and the different social functions served by different types of complexity. A second area of investigation on most memorable experiences examines the influence of various types of personality motives on memory processes.
Office: 415E // Phone: 854-5271 // Email: bw81@columbia.edu
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