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A. Janet Tomiyama
University of California, Los Angeles www.dishlab.org What does your research focus on? Eating is the thread that ties all of my research together. I study the way we eat (whether that’s overeating in response to things like stress, or not eating, meaning fasting and dieting) and how that makes us healthy or unhealthy. As a health psychologist, I tend to examine biological outcome variables like the stress hormone cortisol, or telomeres, a biomarker of aging represented by the length of the caps that protect chromosomes.
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Kate Sweeny
University of California, Riverside http://faculty.ucr.edu/~ksweeny What does your research focus on? I have two primary lines of research, both of which address the question of how people manage difficult life events. My first line of research examines the understudied experience of awaiting uncertain news. People frequently face difficult waiting periods when they anticipate news regarding their own or their loved ones’ health, professional prospects, and academic outcomes, and my research reveals how people cope with this type of uncertainty and seeks to identify successful strategies for navigating painful waiting periods.
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Peggy L. St. Jacques
Harvard University www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~pstjacques What does your research focus on? My research examines the cognitive and neural mechanisms that support autobiographical memory; how memory is affected by age and emotion, and how memory retrieval influences how memories are subsequently retrieved. What drew you to this line of research and why is it exciting to you? I was drawn to research on autobiographical memory because I love a good story, and what better to study than the stories of our lives. What continues to excite me about research on autobiographical memory are its many puzzles: How do daily moments become part of our autobiography?
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Damned Spot: Guilt, Scrubbing, and More Guilt
Lady Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most complex characters, and by far the bard’s most obsessive. Immorally ambitious, she prods her husband to murder Scotland’s king, and then deludes herself into believing that “a little water will clear us of this deed.” But for all of her repeated hand washing, the ritual cannot cleanse her of her consuming guilt, and by Act V the stubborn blood stains have driven the illegitimate queen to madness and suicide. Cruel fate. But Lady Macbeth has recently enjoyed something of a second career, this one in the field of psychological science.
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Bob Spunt
California Institute of Technology www.its.caltech.edu/~spunt/ What does your research focus on? My research seeks to understand the neurocognitive processes that allow humans to perceive and explain human behaviors. My theoretical approach is primarily drawn from attribution theories from social psychology, while my methodological approach is primarily drawn from the social and cognitive neurosciences, in particular, the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging. So far, my work has been concerned with characterizing the neural systems that enable the identification and causal explanation of goal-directed actions and expressions of emotion.
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Kristin Schneider
United States Department of Defense www.linkedin.com/pub/kristin-schneider/21/933/b9a What does your research focus on? I conduct population-level longitudinal mental and behavioral health research studies for the United States Air Force. The focus of my research is on identifying early predictors of risk and resilience for outcomes ranging from the development of specific psychological disorders to suicidality. I’m particularly interested in examining the impact of early screening and intervention on the sequelae of traumatic exposure. What drew you to this line of research and why is it exciting to you?
