Research Faculty and Their Areas of Interests

General Experimental

 

Fields of Study: Personality and Evolutionary Psychology

Research Interests
Our group, the Personality, Evolution, Attraction Research Lab (PEARL), is currently working on several projects.  My students and I are primarily interested in human mating, romantic relationships, and personality.  Current projects in our lab are exploring; human intersexual flirtation, romantic infatuation, mating intelligence, sexual jealousy, cross sex mind-reading, social desirability and personality structure.  We employ a variety of research techniques, however most of our projects use a questionnaire approach.

New Research Students
PEARL is accepting new undergraduate and graduate students.  Our group currently consists of graduate students, undergraduate honors students, and McNair scholars.

Fields of Study: College Student Mental Health, Community Mental Health, Mental Illness Stigma

Research Interests
I work with students who are interested in advocating to improve services for people with trauma, substance abuse, and mental illness. Research projects supporting these efforts may be surveys documenting mental health needs, experimental evaluations of stigma reduction interventions, and working with community-based organizations to support their implementation of evidence-based practices and documentation of program impact.

New Research Students
I may be able to support undergraduate independent study projects in Spring 2019.  Please contact me before applying to the Master's program for more information about my availability to mentor graduate students in Fall 2019.

 

Fields of Study: Longitudinal methods, Personality, Lifespan Development

Research Interests
I work primarily with a long-term longitudinal dataset called the Intergenerational Studies.  These data describe individuals who began participation in 1929 when they were either infants or young school children.I use specialized longitudinal statistical methods to examine changes in personality and psychological health across the lifespan.  I also teach a variety of classes on research design and statistics, so am generally interested in helping students do good research on their own topic of interest.  

New Research Students
I am accepting new graduate students and undergraduate honor students, with whom I work individually, but I do not currently run an undergraduate research team.  

 

Fields of Study: Social Psychology, Personality Psychology, Experimental Existential Psychology, Political Psychology

Research Interests
My students and I examine how stable personality traits and changing situational forces combine in complex ways to alter the dynamics of important social processes. We emphasize the impacts of subconscious processes, biases, and fears upon interpersonal evaluations, identity, ideology, and conformity. Our laboratory research often involves carefully crafted social situations where research assistants conduct experiments or play roles as actors (“confederates”), enabling us to test how (seemingly) real situations affect the ways people think, feel, and behave. 

New Research Students
I welcome applications from new graduate students aiming to enter our General-Experimental Masters Program, and I also regularly work with undergraduate honor students and undergraduate research assistants. 

 

Fields of Study: Perception of virtual reality, Multisensory perception, Psycholinguistics

Research Interests
We are interested in perception in virtual and real environments. Most of our research examines the ways that information from multiple sensory systems is used and combined by perceptual processes. We use virtual reality to examine these questions by skewing the relationship between information provided by different systems (for example, making a lifted object visually appear heavier than it feels to the muscles lifting it). We also examine the interaction between vision and hearing during perception of spoken language, including how this relationship affects higher order cognition such as that involved in word recognition, syntax, or bilingual processes. 

New Research Students
I am accepting new graduate students, and I also work with undergraduate honor students and undergraduate research assistants. 

Fields of Study: NeuroScience, Psychiatric Disorders, Functional Neuroimaging, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, Meta-Analysis, Machine Learning

Research Interests
My students and I study the neuroscience of psychiatric disorders such as major depressive disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. We use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as well as meta-analytic and machine learning tools to synthesize and explore abnormalities in brain function associated with these psychiatric disorders. We are also interested in translating these findings into improved diagnostic strategies and biological treatments such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).

New Research Students
I am accepting graduate students as well as honors and undergraduate students who are interested in volunteering as research assistants.

 

Fields of Study: Clinical Psychology, Neuroscience

Research Interests
My students and I are interested in the intersection of psychopathology and brain based behavior.  We look at a variety of clinical concerns, including Borderline Personality Disorder, Postraumatic Stress Disorder, Autism, and Alzheimer’s disease, from a number of different perspectives, including attachment, basic learning, meditation, and physical neural influences.

New Research Students
I am accepting new graduate students, but I also work with undergraduate honor students and undergraduate research assistants. 

 

Fields of Study: Memory, Effective Processing, Changes in Self-Concept

Research Interests
My students and I explore various aspects of human memory, including basic processes of forgetting and strategies that have been shown to enhance memory such as retrieval practice and the spacing effect. I am also interested in how ideas of our ‘self’ change over time and how we view the changing self through the lens of reconstructed autobiographical memory. 

New Research Students
I accept students and generally work with a team of undergraduates, including independent study students, volunteers, and Psychology Honors students. I occasionally mentor graduate students as well. I encourage all students to conduct their own research projects, either by generating a new research idea (with my help) or by adopting one of my current experiments.

Fields of Study: Cognitive Psychology, Judgement and Decision Making, Quantitative Reasoning, Social Cognition

Research Interests
In the Judgment and Reasoning Lab, my students and I study how people think about themselves and the world around them. Of special interest are how people think about probability and risk, how they make judgments about averages, how they estimate quantities, and how they evaluate themselves compared to others. We are also interested in ways to help people think more clearly about these kinds of things.

New Research Students
I typically accept one or two master’s students and one or two undergraduate honors students each year. The lab also typically involves a number of additional undergraduate research assistants. Please contact me directly for more information.

Fields of Study: Psychophysiology, Behavioral Economics, Neuroscience

Research Interests
My students and I are interested in factors that affect risky economic decisions. We work with a gambling game that we developed and look at factors like emotions, stress and whether the player is gaining or losing points. We are also interested in psychophysiological responses that correlate with decision making like heart rate, heart-rate variability, skin conductance, and facial EMG.

New Research Students
I am accepting new graduate students, but I also work with undergraduate honor students and undergraduate research assistant. 

Fields of Study: Cognitive Forensic Psychology

Research Interests
My Cognitive Science laboratory in the Department of Psychology is devoted to the study of memory and reasoning, especially in the realm of forensic cognitive science.  Research students in this lab receive advanced research training, and conduct experiments, in the areas of eyewitness memory and cognition; the cognitive bases of tactical reasoning, especially with regard to officer-involved shootings; law enforcement training, especially with regard to the detection of improvised explosive devices; and the application of these principles to more general issues in observation and interpretation in science.

New Research Students
I am accepting new graduate students, but I also work with undergraduate honor students and undergraduate research assistant. 

 

Fields of Study: Developmental Psychology, Family Processes, Immigrant Families, Latinos

Research Interests
My students and I are interested understanding how the multiple and dynamic contexts in which immigrant children and families are embedded in influence their development. We work with data collection efforts in Central Valley-area high schools to examine how acculturation-related processes have an impact on Latino children's development by examining factors such as: cultural values, filial responsibilities, language brokering, language proficiency, and parent-child relationships. We are also interested in examining similar constructs during the transition from late adolescence into early adulthood and have been collecting data with Latino college students with an added focus on biculturalism, perceived discrimination, and social relationships.

New Research Students
I am accepting new graduate students, but I also work with undergraduate honor students and research assistants. Please visit https://sites.google.com/mail.fresnostate.edu/rosatoro/home for more information.

 

Fields of Study: Quantitative Methods

Research Interests
My current research interests include both Likert scaling research and academic procrastination. Examples of recent Likert work include examining impact of True/False versus Agree/Disagree scale responses, as well as comparing various middle point options, such as ‘neither agree nor disagree’ versus ‘undecided.’ Recent student theses have focused on conducting validation studies on various psychological constructs.

New Research Students
I am potentially accepting new graduate students on a case-by-case basis. I also work with undergraduate honor students and undergraduate research assistants who are interested in quantitative methods and/or academic procrastination. I have a limited number of research slots at a given time, so please contact me if you are interested in potentially working together.

Applied Behavioral Analysis

 

Fields of Study: Applied Behavior Analysis

Research Interests
My students and I are interested in studying verbal processes and teaching complex forms of verbal behavior and social skills to children with and without autism spectrum disorder. We are also interested in examining motivating operations and exploring interventions to increase health and fitness behaviors. 

New Research Students
I am currently accepting new graduate students (specifically those applying to the ABA Master’s degree program) and also work with undergraduate honors students and undergraduate research assistants.

Fields of Study: Behavior Analysis, Applied Animal Behavior, Environmental Sustainability

Research Interests
My students and I are interested in using behavior analytic principles to change the behavior of shelter animals.  More specifically, we are interested in identifying effective methods for changing behavior such that the “adoptability” of shelter animals increases. We are also interested in determining effective methods for increasing environmentally sustainable behaviors in humans.  More information on current and completed projects can be found on my lab website http://drpaynelab.com.

New Research Students
I am accepting new graduate students, and occasionally will accept undergraduate students.

 

 

Fields of Study: Organizational Behavior Management, Systems Analysis, Healthy Eating, Rule-Governed Behavior

Research Interests
I work with my students on improving employee and manager behavior in the workplace. Some of this research includes using performance scorecards to enhance employee behaviors, evaluating motivation through message content or manipulating tasks, and how employees respond to negative events in simulated work settings. My students and I also work with increasing healthy food selection and consumption with children in schools, college students on campus, and consumers in supermarkets and restaurants. 

New Research Students
I am accepting new graduate students, but I also work with undergraduate research assistants.

Educational Specialists Program (Ed.S.)

 

 

Fields of Study: Resilience in cultural context, mental health in school settings across cultures, international school psychophysiology

Research Interests
My research interests all center around culture. I am interested in resilience promotion in cultural contexts, especially specific factors that enhance student resilience and mental health in school settings. I focus on resilience promoting interventions in schools and cultural adaptation of these practices. Meanwhile, I am interested in school psychological services  in other countries and how they are and can be adapted to maximally meet students’ needs in schools. Thus, I do research about how to incorporate cultural factors in professional development of school psychological providers. 

New Research Students
Currently accepting applications for the Educational Specialist Program.