Department of Psychology

Department of Psychology
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Research Labs

Arizona State University, the third-largest university in the United States, is the model metropolitan research university for the next century. Accredited by the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, this rapidly growing, multi campus public research university offers programs from the baccalaureate through the doctorate for 59,871 full-time and part-time students. ASU is ranked among the nation's 88 leading research universities by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. This status indicates successful garnering of support for research projects and educating future scientists. ASU's 2,970 faculty members successfully competed for more than $154.7 million in research and training grants in 2006-07. ASU provides the greater Phoenix metropolitan area with access to higher education opportunities through multiple campuses, off campus sites, flexible schedules, and distance learning technologies. ASU is a modern university that applies its research capabilities to the rapidly evolving needs of Maricopa County and the state.

The Department of Psychology has been directly responsible for the success of research efforts at Arizona State University, garnering support at the federal, state and local levels, from both private and public industries. Research in the department ranges from perception studies to behavioral neuroscience experimentation to counseling.

 

Research Labs

Arizona Health & Aging Lab (AHAL)

 The Arizona Health and Aging Lab (AHA) is a collaborative lab conducting on-going studies examining factors that contribute to resilience in aging, including the relation between stress and biological risk factors for disease.

Behavioral Alcohol Research for Clinical   Advancement (BARCA)

 The Behavioral Alcohol Research for Clinical Advancement [BARCA] lab conducts laboratory and survey research on  processes involved in the development of alcohol-related problems including alcohol use disorders.

Basic Behavioral Processes Lab

 Dr. Federico Sanabria's Lab.

Behavioral Neuroscience Research in Stress

The studies performed in our lab investigate morphological and functional changes in the hippocampus following chronic stress. our studies investigate the mechanism(s) that underlie changes in hippocampal dendritic morphology following chronic stress to facilitate treatment strategies for cognitive improvement. More...

Child Emotion Center (CEC)

 At the CEC, researchers explore early biological and environmental risk and protective factors for later mental and physical health of children.

Child and Family Intervention Program

 At the Child and Family Intervention Program, we conduct studies to address the four Ps: (1) discerning various levels of risk to increase capacity for predicting the onset and course of anxiety disorders and their sequela (depression, use of alcohol tobacco and other illicit drugs), (2) developing and identifying indicated anxiety prevention strategies that pre-empt the onset of anxiety disorders, (3) using knowledge from (1) and (2) to better personalize anxiety prevention and treatment, (4) including participation from a diversity of people (teachers, school counselors) and settings (schools, private mental health service sectors) involved in the promotion of child health and resilience. Our chief objective is to advance knowledge in these four areas to improve long-term developmental trajectories of children and families.

Child Study Lab

The Psychology Department houses the Child Study Laboratory, attended by more than 100 preschool children, which has facilities for both laboratory and naturalistic research projects.

Conditioned Feeding Laboratories

Dr. Capalid's research aims to understand the learning processes that produce conditioned food preferences. The research concerns how flavors come to be preferred by being associated with already preferred flavors or with nutrients.

Drug Addiction Laboratory

The primary research focus of the lab is to study the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie drug dependence and craving.

Dynamics of Perception Action and Cognition

(DPAC)

DPAC is a multidisciplinary research team whose focus is the application of nonlinear dynamics, complex systems, and ecological psychology to the fields of perception, action, and cognition. 
Embodied Cognition Lab How do words, objects, and events become meaningful to us? Glenberg and his students are attacking these problems by developing an embodied theory of cognition:  All cognitive processes are based on neural processes of perception, action, and emotion.

Hammer Lab

My laboratory studies plasticity and neural adaptation in mesocorticolimbic systems. We have focused on the nucleus accumbens (NAc) due to its involvement in addiction and certain symptoms of schizophrenia.
Health & Coping Lab

Research conducted in this lab examines social and cognitive influences on stress, coping, and physical health. Primary areas of focus include women's health, spirituality, and the influence of childhood experiences on psychological and physical health in adulthood.

Memory and Aging Laboratory

The objective of our laboratory is to determine relationships between hormonal, cognitive and neurobiological alterations during aging using animal models. More...

Memory &

Language Lab (MLL)

The MLL conducts research into many aspects of human memory, such as memory for faces and voices. We also study interactions of memory and language, as in reading.

This lab is currently working on representation of objects in photographs and drawings and is also doing a short-term longitudinal study of children's acquisition of expertise.

Neuberg Lab

We are currently exploring the following questions, and others like them: Why do we stigmatize some people and not others? Why are we prejudiced against some groups and not others? Why do we feel and act differently toward members of different stigmatized groups?

Operant Behavioral Research Lab

Dedicated to the experimental and quantitative analysis of animal behavior, including associative and instrumental learning, timing, memory, and impulse control.

Prevention Research Center (PRC)

The PRC was established to develop, evaluate and disseminate prevention programs for children and families in high stress situations. Research focuses on children and families experiencing four different stressors, parental divorce, poverty, bereavement, and parental job loss.

The PAL is devoted to the exploration of fundamental issues in human categorization, ranging from the variables known to shape concepts to the investigation of higher-order issues in categorization theory.

Research in Prevention Laboratory (RIPL)

 RIPL is a research group at Arizona State University. Our projects are headed by Dr. David MacKinnon and focus on prevention research and methodology.

Resilience Solutions Group

RSG is dedicated to advancing knowledge of resilience within the scientific community and using current knowledge to help people become more resilient. We are also dedicated to teaching communities how to provide their people with resilient solutions to the problems they face in everyday life.

Sensory Motor Research Group (SMoRG)

The overall aim of the research carried out in the SMoRG lab is to both understand the intricacies of neural control of real arm movement, and to address crucial bioengineering issues in the design of neuro-electronic hybrid systems.
Social Cognition Lab Our lab explores the processes that influence the selective and automatic direction of our limited perceptual and cognitive resources.
University-Community Partnership for Social Action Research Network A team of faculty from the Arizona State University, Centre for Research and several Universities spanning the globe are conducting a participatory research project on the development of University-Community Partnership for Social Action Research (UCP-SARnet) and its impact on community at large.