psychology

Young Scientist

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Mara Richman standing by her research posters
Mara Richman presented research at the North America Society for the Study of Personality Disorders.

Mara Richman ’15 has built an impressive scientific résumé in three short undergraduate years–and she has yet to reach her Senior Individualized Project (SIP) term!

During her study abroad in Budapest, Hungary the psychology major collaborated with Dr. Zsolt Unoka on research in depression and borderline personality disorder. She presented that work, titled “Mental state decoding deficit in major depression and borderline personality disorder: a meta-analysis,” at the North America Society for the Study of Personality Disorders. Think the age of David (when he confronted Goliath) or of Joan of Arc … Mara was the youngest presenter at NASSPD! And she will be one of the youngest oral presenters at the prestigious International Congress on Borderline Personality Disorder and Allied Disorders (Rome, Italy), where her paper was accepted and where she will detail the meta-analysis she completed with Unoka. Their research also has been submitted in manuscript form to Clinical Psychology Review.

To date, Mara has six manuscripts published or in review for publication on research into schizophrenia, drug courts, and borderline personality disorder. She has presented research (or had research accepted for presentation) at Stanford University, the Association for Psychological Science, the Midwestern Psychological Association, the Mid America Undergraduate Research Conference, and the Michigan Undergraduate Psychology Conference. And she will present her work at the American Psychological Association in August. Most of this BEFORE she begins in earnest her SIP work. That will happen this summer at Harvard University Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry under mentor ship of one of the world’s foremost experts on borderline personality disorder, Dr. Mary Zanarini.

Given her youth and her accomplishments so far, it may not be too surprising that Mara will graduate after her senior fall term. She hopes to work in a lab for nine months or so and then apply to graduate school. She plans to earn a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and focus her research on borderline personality disorder.

MVPs Together Again

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John Evans and Aaron Thornburg
John Evans (left) and Aaron Thornburg during their Hornet soccer days

During their K days, Aaron Thornburg ’02 and John Evans ’02 were often together. After all, both majored in psychology, and both played on the Hornet men’s soccer team, where they shared MIAA championships (three) and team MVP honors. This year they are teaming up again.

In their junior year, 2001, John and Aaron spent a summer together in Guatemala City to train for their upcoming K soccer season and to conduct research for their Senior Individualized Projects. Thirteen years later they will be back in Guatemala City together, this time collaborating on a different scholarly initiative.

In June, the two Hornets will lead a group of some 20 Seattle University students on a Central American study abroad experience, part of a course Aaron developed called Cultural Intelligence and Global Business Communication. The project seeks to improve international leadership abilities among graduate and undergraduate students, so they may better facilitate constructive outcomes and effective cross-cultural interactions in global business.

Aaron’s interest in cultural intelligence dates to his first experience in international living—his K study abroad experience in Strasbourg, France. “The quarter in France opened my eyes to a world with a rich diversity of cultures. Because crossing borders will continue to grow in both frequency and importance, we all need to better understand how to function as leaders across cultural boundaries. Cultural intelligence is a crucial skill and aptitude in the world of business. But more importantly, it helps us understand and relate better to people with backgrounds different than our own. And that enables people to connect on a personal and empathetic level, which I believe is the foundation to a better world.”

After graduating from K, Aaron, an Okemos (Mich.) native, earned his J.D. and M.B.A. from Michigan State University. He then lived and worked in Asia, South America, and Europe. Currently, he resides in Seattle, Wash., where he teaches international business at Seattle University’s Albers School of Business and Economics.

Aaron’s résumé includes work at Instituto de Empresa (IE) (Madrid, Spain), a top-ranked international business school. One of his colleagues there was fellow classmate Justin Swinsick ’02, who served as the school’s executive director of international programs. Aaron’s time at IE also coincided with those of Lisa Emami ’02 and Nathan Burns ’03—a tribute to how international the K study body truly is!

John Evans’ international experience began before he even arrived at K. He grew up living part-time in Petoskey, Michigan, and part-time in Guatemala City, Guatemala.

After K, John earned his master’s degree in counseling psychology from Western Michigan University (2007). He worked one year as an admission counselor at K, and then attended the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he completed his doctorate in sport and exercise psychology. In North Carolina he worked with athletes with skill levels ranging from developmental to Olympic-class. Today John lives in Columbia, S.C. He works for the United States Army Training Center at Fort Jackson in the Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness program, sharing sport and performance psychology skills with soldiers and family members.

Buena suerte to both men this June. You can follow their Guatemala study abroad experience @GuateAbroad on Twitter and Instagram. Article by Ross Bower ’03

Mud-Luscious and Puddle-Wonderful

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Young boy in rain gear splashes in puddles
Jack in Puddle (Robert Murphy). http://www.flickr.com/photos/imurphy/22752012/ Creative commons license

Spring means puddles and puddles mean children and children mean the hard work of play, a.k.a. some pretty cool voyages to some wild new worlds, all within a puddle. To prepare her latest blog post (which could easily double as an homage to e.e. cummings) Associate Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan watched hours of YouTube videos of infants and toddlers interacting with the puddle-wonderful universe of early spring snow-melt or rain’s footprints. She culled them down to a list of eight favorites and shared the list on the Psychology Today website. Those favorites include: Boy Meets First Puddle; Puddle Splashing in Cape Breton; Athena Splashing in Puddles; Charlie Discovers Puddles; Freya’s First Puddle; What if You Encounter a Mud Puddle When You’re Driving Your John Deere Tractor?; Little Girl in Pink Snowsuit Discovers Ice for the First Time; and A Kid, A Dog, and a Puddle–and there’s a lot of learning going on in each, for both the subjects and the viewer. For the latter, Siu-Lan writes comments about the psychological “goings-on” in each encounter. These include phenomena studied by the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (circular reactions and sensorimotor intelligence) and other concepts such as joint attention episode, self efficacy, interactional synchrony, and linkage between joy and academic success.

“As I sifted through scores of videos of infants and children stomping and splashing in puddles, I was reminded that play is a child’s work,” Siu-Lan wrote. “The foundations of everything a child needs to learn across the domains–cognitive, emotional, and social–are learned through play. This is so beautifully illustrated in a moment of curiosity, discovery, and joy of a child, evoked by a small pool of water left after the rain.”

Siu-Lan blogs regularly for Psychology Today under the rubric “What Shapes Film? Elements of the Cinematic Experience and More.”

Sound Affects DOOM

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Sound off or sound on?

Turns out that music makes better DOOM–or, more precisely, players of that first-person video shooter game score a lot higher with the sound (music and effects) on … at least according to one study.

Associate Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan joined renowned video game composer Sascha Dikiciyan (Sonic Mayhem) to give an interview on the psychological effects of video game music. The interview occurred on the blog Consequence of Sound, a.k.a. CoS. That interview went live a couple days ago and is nearing 1,500 views on YouTube.

In order to tell the rest of the science behind the story, Professor Tan used her Psychology Today blog to post a related piece: “Video Games: Do you play better with sound on or off?”

Turns out the science is complicated. The results of the aforementioned DOOM study were seemingly contradicted by a study of Ridge Racer V, which found that gamers with the fastest lap times had the music off.

And it gets more complicated than that. Professor Tan’s K research (a collaboration with her SIP student John Baxa ’09) studied gamers playing Twilight Princess-Legend of Zelda (ya gotta love these names!). In the Twilight study, the worst performers played with both music and sound effects off. And the study found that the more the game’s audio was incrementally added, the more performance improved. And yet (in another wrinkle) the best performances occurred to background music UNRELATED TO THE GAME (!) … think boom box across the room. A closer examination suggested more nuances based on game familiarity and gaming skill. Turns out that average skill level newbies tune out the audio to focus exclusively on visual cues when first navigating the game. Not so for high skill level players, new to the game or not. These players are skilled, in part, because they pay attention–and effectively integrate–auditory and visual cues, both of which provide feedback for the best moves.

Tan writes: “I’m also reminded of what a participant in our study expressed so well: ’There’s more to a game than just high scores. It’s also about being transported and immersed in another world, and music and sound effects are what bring you there.’”

Indeed, writes Tan, “When you have a great soundtrack, music can be the soul of a game.”  NOTE: Tan and Baxa (along with Matt Sprackman) published their music/video game research in 2010 and 2012. Baxa said it aided his entrance to graduate school for study on video games. He is currently a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University.

Kalamazoo College Faculty News

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Some recent news about Kalamazoo College professors:

PUBLICATIONS and EXHIBITS
Carol Anderson (Religion) published “The Possibility of a Postcolonial Buddhist Ethic of Wealth,” an article in Buddhist-Christian Studies…Rose Bundy (Japanese Language and Literature) published “Beneath the Moss,” a set of translations by Fujiwara Shunzei, in the new translation journal Transference…Henry Cohen (Romance Languages) published “The Eldorado Episodes of Voltaire’s Candide as an Intertext of Augusto Roa Bastos’ Yo El Supremo: A Utopia/Dystopia Relationship” in Revista De Estudios Hispanicos…Kiran Cunningham ’83 (Anthropology and Sociology) published “Structured Reflection for Transforming Learning: Linking Home and Away,” in the Salzburg Global Seminar’s Creating Sites of Global Citizenship…Péter Érdi (Luce Professor of Complex Systems Studies) co-authored three papers: “The Past, Present, and Future of Cybernetics and Systems Research” in the journal Systems; “An Integrated Theory of Budgetary Politics and Some Empirical Tests: The U.S. National Budget, 1791-2010” in the American Journal of Political Science; and “Anxiolytic Drugs and Altered Hippocampal Theta Rhythms: The Quantitative Systems Pharmacological Approach” in Network: Computation in Neural Systems…Jim Langeland ’86 (Biology) and Blaine Moore (Biology) are co-authors of a paper accepted for publication in Molecular Biology and Evolution that contributes to the understanding of Alzheimer’s disease. The project was partially funded by a GLCA New Directions Initiative and had four Kalamazoo College students or alumni as co-authors (see a recent K News & Events article about this here.)…Amy Lane (Anthropology and Sociology) published “Religion is not a Monolith: Religious Experience at a Midwestern Liberal Arts College,” an article in Journal of College and Character…Sarah Lindley (Art) exhibited her sculptures in shows at Eastern Michigan University, Alma College, and Hope College…Bruce Mills (English) published An Archaeology of Yearning, a book by the Etruscan Press…Siu-Lan Tan (Psychology) co-authored three chapters and served as primary editor for the book, The Psychology of Music in Multimedia (Oxford University Press, 2013).

AWARDS and GRANTS
Kiran Cunningham ’83 (Anthropology and Sociology) has been awarded the 2014 Dr. Winthrop S. and Lois A. Hudson Award, awarded biannually for the purpose of honoring outstanding K faculty members…John Fink (Mathematics) has been awarded the Lucasse Lectureship for Outstanding Teaching at K…Alison Geist (Mary Jane Underwood Stryker Institute for Civic Engagement) was awarded one of the first Kalamazoo County Spirit of Health Equity awards…Binney Girdler (Biology and Environmental Studies) has been awarded grants from the Michigan Botanical Foundation and from the Central Michigan University Institute for Great Lakes Research…Bruce Mills (English) has been awarded a GLCA New Directions Initiative grant for his work on building a civil rights oral history archive…Lanny Potts (Theatre Arts) was awarded the 2013 Wilde Award for “Best Lighting Designer of the Year” in the state of Michigan for his work on “The Light in the Piazza” at Farmer’s Alley Theatre…Regina Stevens-Truss (Chemistry) has received funding from the GLCA Expanding Collaboration Initiative to study digital resources for learning experimental science.

NEW POSITIONS
Alyce Brady (Mathematics and Computer Science) is an Arcus Center Faculty Fellow. She will work collaboratively with universities in Sierra Leone to develop sustainable open-source academic record-keeping software…Reid Gómez is Mellon Visiting Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies, focusing on campus climate, faculty development, and curriculum development…Starting July 1, 2014, Mike Sosulski (German and Media Studies) will serve as Associate Provost and Paul Sotherland (Biology) will be the inaugural Coordinator of Teaching, Learning, and Educational Effectiveness.

ENDOWED CHAIRS
The following Kalamazoo College faculty members are the recipients of newly endowed chairs: R. Amy Elman, William Weber Professor in Social Science…Laura Lowe Furge, Roger F. and Harriet G. Varney Professor of Chemistry…Gary S. Gregg, Ann V. and Donald R. Parfet Distinguished Professor of Psychology…Ahmed M. Hussen, Edward and Virginia Van Dalson Professor of Economics and Business…Richard Koenig, Genevieve U. Gilmore Professor of Art…Amy MacMillan, L. Lee Stryker Assistant Professor of Business Management…Ed Menta, James B. Stone College Professor of Theatre Arts…Taylor G. Petrey, Lucinda Hinsdale Stone Assistant Professor of Religion.

Of Bears and Babies

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Associate Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan writes a blog for the magazine Psychology Today under the topic heading “What Shapes Film? Elements of the Cinematic Experience.” That assignment keeps her eye on YouTube videos that go viral. For example, recently, some 4 million viewers have had the “cinematic experience” of watching a three-month old polar bear take his first wobbly steps at the Toronto Zoo. Where most of us may see a bear only, Tan sees human beings as well. Her recent blog post notes that both share a phenomenon of physical development known as the cephalocaudal principle, which means that bear and baby’s first movements tend to be in reverse. The blog is a fun, informative read with some pretty cute video illustrations. Part of the fun derives from the fact that both species are subject to a lot of individual variation when it comes to learning self-locomotion. Crawlers, rollers, and scooters, oh my!

Tan is a popular blogger on other academic topics.  One of her posts on singing and emotional contagion was named #4 of Oxford University Press Blog’s Top 10 Posts of the Year 2013.  That post was also selected as #22 of Psychology Today’s Top 25 Posts of the Year 2013, out of a total of about 14,000 annual posts.

In other news, Tan’s article titled “Visual Representations of Music in Three Cultures: UK, Japan, and Papua New Guinea” was published in December in the Empirical Musicology Review. Her blog is also posted at Oxford University Press.

Face Time

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We love faces; our lives depend on it from an early age. And a close-up on a face is one of the most notable differences between the experience of a movie and the experience of live theater. When we choose to see a film instead of a play it may be, in part, because were drawn to the human face. In her latest installment of her Psychology Today blog (What Shapes Film?) Associate Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan explores what attracts us to cinematic face time. Her article is aptly titled “3 Reasons Why We’re Drawn to Faces in Film.” Maybe it should be four reasons, because music plays a big role as well. It’s a fascinating read, and Tan demonstrates her points with faces from some pretty famous films, including Amelie, It’s a Wonderful Life, Saving Private Ryan, and Toy Story 2, among others. Of particular interest is how facial close-ups make us, the audience, both mirror and blank-canvas-and-painter, depending on a face’s intensity or nuance, respectively.

Weeping Baby

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Associate Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan wrote an article (“Why Does this Baby Weep when her Mother Sings?”) for Psychology Today that elucidates an infant’s actions in a You Tube video gone viral. The video shows an infant — Mary Lynne Leroux — emoting deeply to her mother’s singing. Tan suggests the infant’s reactions result from psychological phenomena called emotional contagion and emotional synchrony in combination with the bell-shaped melody of the song itself and just plain wonder. Of course, people (21 million views and counting) are responding more to the magic of the piece rather than its clinical explanation. And the latter in no way diminishes the former. To the question of whether her analysis made the video “any less magical,” Tan wrote, “In my view, it may be even more remarkable and even more compelling to think that what we are witnessing may not just be the power of the human voice and singing — but a window into how deeply and powerfully we are moved by the emotions of those around us, even in our earliest interactions.” It’s an intriguing video and article.

Kalamazoo College Professor Péter Érdi Earns Award from International Neural Networks Societies

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Peter Erdi among three accepting awards
Kalamazoo College Professor Peter Erdi (left), Plamen Angelov (Lancaster University), and Daniel Levine (University of Texas at Arlington) received Outstanding Service Awards at the 2013 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks. Photo by Wentao Guo.

Péter Érdi, K’s Henry R. Luce Professor of Complex Systems Studies, served as the Program Chair for the 2013 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), the premier international conference in the area of neural networks theory, analysis, and application. This year’s IJCNN was held in Dallas, Texas and was attended by more than 500 people.

Professor Érdi, who teaches in K’s departments of Physics and Psychology, was also one of three chairs of the Organizing Committee to receive the Outstanding Service Award from the International Neural Network Society and the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers Computational Intelligence Society, the two leading professional organizations for researchers working in neural networks.

He joined other big names in neural research who received awards at the conference, including Stephen Grossberg (Boston University), considered by many in the field to be the father/inventor of adaptive resonance theory; Terry Sejnowski  (University California at San Diego) who works on President Obama’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies initiative, which is being compared to the Human Genome Project and the moon landing initiative; and Frank Lewis, a Distinguished Professor at University of Texas Arlington Research Institute who received the IEEE Pioneer in Neural Networks Award for his work in bringing together optimal and adaptive control.

K Professor Siu-Lan Tan Teams with Hollywood Stars in “The Art of the Score”

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K Psychology Associate Professor Siu-Lan Tan
K Associate Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan

Kalamazoo College Associate Professor of Psychology Siu-Lan Tan joined actor Alec Baldwin, Academy Award-winning filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, composer Carter Burwell, and Tufts University neuroscientist Aniruddh Patel as part of The Art of the Score: The Mind, Music, and Moving Images, a co-presentation by World Science Festival and the New York Philharmonic about the uniquely powerful role of music in shaping the emotional impact of film.

Professor Tan served as primary editor of The Psychology of Music in Multimedia published by Oxford University Press in 2013. This book has been recognized as the first to consolidate scientific research on how we integrate sound and image when engaging with film, television, video, interactive games, and computer interfaces. She is also first author of a leading text entitled Psychology of Music: From Sound to Significance (Psychology Press/Routledge 2010, 2013). Tan’s work also appears in Music Perception, Psychology of Music, Psychomusicology, Empirical Musicology Review, International Journal of Gaming, and other journals.

Born in Indonesia and raised in Hong Kong, Siu-Lan Tan earned degrees in piano and music before attending Purdue University, Oxford University, and Georgetown University to complete an M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology. She has taught at K since 1998.