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Towson University Fall 2018 1
TOWSON UNIVERSITY EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY NEWSLETTER
Fernanda Andrade recently began a PhD program in
Psychology and Neuroscience with a concentration in
Social Psychology at Duke University. Her research with Dr.
Rick Hoyle focuses on how people pursue and manage
health goals.
CJ Arayata started a new job as a Data Visualization and
Reporting Analyst at BAYADA Home Health Care.
Cherish Ardinger began a PhD program in Addiction Neuroscience
at IUPUI (Indiana University—Purdue University of Indianapolis).
Rebeccah Bernard began working as a Staff Clinical Psychologist on
the PTSD Clinical Team at the Syracuse VA Medical Center. Brandon
Boring entered a PhD program in Social and Personality Psychology
at Texas A&M University. Kari Haines started a PhD program in
Addiction Neuroscience at IUPUI. She recently finished a two-year
ORISE research fellowship at the US Army Medical Research Institute
of Chemical Defense.
LaTasha Holden graduated with her PhD in Psychology from
Princeton University. She is currently a National Assessment of
Educational Progress Postdoctoral Fellow at the Educational Testing
Service. She was selected as the inaugural Provost’s Post-Doctoral
Position at Florida State University. In January, she will be
examining a behavioral genetics approach to math and reading
achievement with Dr. Sara Hart. Marshall Miller is now a
postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Aging at Duke University.
Antonia Santoro is pursuing her PhD in Social and Health Psychology
at Kent State University. She was recently teaching as an adjunct
professor of Social Psychology at Towson University, while also
completing an ORISE fellowship with the US Army Military Research
Institute of Chemical Defense. Mark Schultz has finished his
post-doc at Merck and is now working as an investigator at
Galaxo.
ALUMNI UPDATES
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Towson University Fall 2018 2
WELCOME, FIRST YEAR STUDENTS!
Name Undergraduate School Advisor
Michael Droboniku UMBC Dr. Matthew Mychailyszyn
Esau Garcia Keystone College Dr. Geoff Munro
Krystyna Griswold Towson University Dr. Justin Buckingham
Brittany Hayes Salisbury University Dr. Jan Sinnott
Kathryn Hundertmark Towson University Dr. Mark Chachich
Sarah Jaweed Loyola University Dr. Maria Fracasso
Ian Moss Towson University Dr. Jan Sinnott
Christopher Mullin Towson University Dr. Jared McGinley
Andrea Norr Arizona State University Dr. Jeff Kukucka
Brittney Workman Towson University Dr. Bryan Devan
Front Row : Krystyna Griswold, Brittney Workman, Andrea Norr,
Esau Garcia, Michael Droboniku / Back Row:
Christopher Mullin, Brittany Hayes, Sarah Jaweed, Kathryn
Hundertmark / Not pictured: Ian Moss
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Towson University Fall 2018 3
STUDENT/ALUMNI PUBLICATIONS
Kyle Berger co-authored an article with Dr. Bryan Devan: Devan,
B.D., Berger, K., & McDonald, R. (2018) The emergent engram: A
historical legacy and contemporary discovery. Frontiers
in Behavioral Neuroscience, 12, doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00168
Tiana Cruz co-authored two articles: Salas, R. E., Kalloo, A.,
Earley, C. J., Celnik, P., Cruz, T. E., Foster, K., Cantarero, G.,
& Allen, R. P. (2018). Connecting clinical
aspects to cortico-motor excitability in restless legs syndrome:
A TMS study. Sleep Medicine. Lemmon, M. E., Gamaldo, C. E., Salas,
R. E., Saxena, A., Cruz, T. E., Boss, R. D., & Strowd, R. E.
(2018). Difficult conversations in
neurology: Lessons learned from medical students. Neurology, 90,
93-97. doi: 10.1212/WNL.0000000000004794 Anita Delahay co-authored
several articles: Delahay, A. B., & Lovett, M. C. (2018, June).
Multimedia learning principles at scale predict quiz performance.
In Proceedings of
the Fifth Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale (pp.
36-39). London, England: ACM. Delahay, A.B. & Reder, L.M.
(2018). Short-term memory. In B. Frey (Ed.), The SAGE Encyclopedia
of Educational Research,
Measurement, and Evaluation (pp. 1512-1513). Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage Publications. Shen, Z., Popov, V., Delahay, A.B, & Reder,
L.M. (2018). Item strength affects working memory capacity. Memory
& Cognition, 46
(2), 204-215. Tiffany Lam, Fernanda Andrade, Brandon Boring, and
Danielle Emery have an article coming out with Dr. Justin
Buckingham: Buckingham, J.T., Lam, T.A., Andrade, F.C., Boring,
B.L., & Emery, D.N. (in press). Reducing contingent self-worth:
A defensive
response to self-threats. Journal of Social Psychology. Bryan
Moore published a book: Moore, B.A. & Aranyi, J. (2018). You’re
still not doing this?! 25 Well-established ways to elevate your
health, happiness, and
overall awesomeness. Baltimore, MD: Wakebridge Publishing.
Christopher Normile co-authored two articles: Scherr, K.C.,
Normile, C.J., & Putney, H. (2018). Perpetually stigmatized:
False confessions prompt underlying mechanisms that
motivate negative perceptions of exonerees. Psychology, Public
Policy, and Law, 24(3), 341-352 Scherr, K.C., Normile, C.J.,
Bierstetel, S.J., Franks, A.S., & Hawkins, I. (2018) Knowingly
but naively: The overpowering influence
of innocence on interrogation rights decision-making. Law and
Human Behavior, 42(1), 26-36
Drew Parton published his thesis with Dr. Mike Ent: Parton, D.M.
& Ent, M.R. (2018). Vulnerable narcissism predicts greater
spiteful punishment of a third-party transgressor.
Journal of Research in Personality, 76, 150-153
Fernanda Andrade
Catherine Butt
Belinda Chen
Daniel Jackson
Alan Leigh
Drew Parton
NEW EXPY ALUMNI
Alan Leigh was awarded the Outstanding
Experimental Psychology Graduate Student
award.
Fernanda Andrade received the Outstanding
Psychology Graduate Student award.
Maria St. Pierre recently won a student
research award from the Association for
Psychological Science.
EXPY AWARDS
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Towson University Fall 2018 4
STUDENT/ALUMNI PRESENTATIONS
Fernanda Andrade, Daniel Jackson, and Alan Leigh presented “I
feel you:” Intellectual humility and
physiological reactions to counterattitudinal views about
immigration at the Towson University PGSA
conference.
Andrew Bennett presented Validity ratings of traditional and
novel sexuality scales by heterosexual adults at
the Towson University PGSA conference.
Brandon Boring with Dr. Jared McGinley and Dr. Justin Buckingham
presented The effects of self-affirmation
on performance and affect at the Towson University PGSA
conference.
Catherine Butt presented Perceived engagement of higher powers
as predictors of God concept endorsement
at the Towson University PGSA conference.
Cristiana Iafolla, Kristy Meads, and Alex Bravo presented
Resilience as a predictor of physiological responses
to stress at the Towson University PGSA conference.
Drew Parton and Deborah Carson with Dr. Jared McGinley and Dr.
Mike Ent presented Physiological
responses to personally experienced and vicariously experienced
social ostracism at the Towson University PGSA
conference & Self-reported emotional reactions to personally
experienced and vicariously experienced social
ostracism at the Towson University Research and Creative Inquiry
Forum.
Towson University Conferences
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STUDENT/ALUMNI PRESENTATIONS
Fernanda Andrade with Dr. Justin Buckingham presented
Self-improvement after an academic threat: The interaction
between implicit and explicit self-esteem at the Society of
Personality and Social Psychology National Conference.
Tiana Cruz presented The food access & student well-being
study, Show me the money! Using research to request funds
for your SI program, De-stressing social media: Profiles of
social media usage and their association with student
well-being,
& How to foster an inclusive campus community: student
attitudes towards diversity and perceptions of campus climate
at
various University of Maryland conferences.
Belinda Chen and Alan Leigh presented Emotion regulation and
moral judgment at the annual meeting of the Eastern
Psychological Association.
Alan Leigh with Dr. Jessica Stansbury, Dr. Geoff Munro, and Dr.
Jared McGinley presented To push or not to push?
Responses in moral dilemmas reveal aversion to harmful actions
rather than moral preferences & Emotion and “simple”
morality: Avoiding and condemning negative immediate outcomes at
the Society of Personality and Social Psychology
National Conference.
Drew Parton and David Rompilla with Dr. Jared McGinley presented
Eight cases with non-significant relationships
between resting heart rate variability and individual difference
measures at the 30th Annual Convention for the Association
for Psychological Science & Escaping the file drawer: Is
heart rate variability always useful as a biomarker for self-
regulation? at the 58th Annual Meeting for the Society of
Psychophysiological Research.
Jesse Rothweiler with Dr. Kerri Goodwin and Dr. Jeff Kukucka
presented Does social facilitation affect cross-race
identifications? at the annual meeting of the American
Psychology-Law Society.
Jared Wildberger with Dr. Elizabeth Katz presented Marijuana
attitudes among substance use clinicians at the Research
Society on Marijuana 2nd Annual Meeting.
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Towson University Fall 2018 6
MEET THE EXPY FACULTY
DR. JARED MCGINLEY
What are your research interests?
Fundamentally, I’m interested in emotion, just at the most basic
level, as
William James wrote back in the 1890s, “what is an emotion?”
That was
the title of his paper in the journal “Mind” in 1884. At this
time, I still want
to understand that 125 years later. There’s so much research on
emotion
in the last couple decades, but we still don’t fundamentally
have an
agreement on how to define or put constraints on it. I want to
understand
what emotion is, how reproducible it is across people and then
understand
things like when you are engaging in an emotional sharing bond
(like an
empathetic bond with someone), to what degree is that emotion
the
same, and are we actually measuring that at the physiological
level. When
I’m looking at blood pressure and heart rate changes, breathing,
and sweat
gland activity, how much is it exactly what you experience. On
top of that,
I’m really interested in emotion regulation, adaptability, and
resilience,
and the physiology of all these things. Can we find a
physiological profile
that shows whether people are better at adapting in stressful
situations?
How did you become interested in this type of research?
When I was an undergrad, I studied religion and psychology. I
was really
interested in the emotion of spiritual experiences and things
like that. I
wanted to understand how you could really explore the biology of
that.
When I got into that, I just wanted to understand how you take
big,
seemingly hard to define variables and then measure them at the
discrete
levels. Emotion seemed like one of the hardest things to
capture, but
fundamentally things that seem really hard to measure are what
I’ve
always wanted to try to measure.
What kind of studies are you working on right now?
In one of the studies I have with a student (she’s an undergrad
thesis
student), we’re looking at people with high or low anxiety, and
their high
or low heart rate variability. Heart rate variability is
supposed to be a
construct that reflects how much you’re able to adapt to
situations. We
have these people that maybe have high anxiety and low heart
rate
variability, and then we’re going to put them in a stressful
task where they
have to perform a lot of working memory tasks to see if we
can
differentiate people on their performance based on an
interaction
between their anxiety and their basic healthy
physiology. The idea is maybe that people who are
high anxiety, but also healthy, can perform well; but,
it might just be uniquely that those who are high
anxiety with poor health are going to struggle
through some of these stressful cognitive tasks.
Finally, can you tell us about some of your
interests/hobbies outside of research?
I listen to so many podcasts, it’s kind of hard to even
describe. I have listened to maybe 30-35 different
podcasts. For about 4 hours a day I listen to them,
but all in 1.5 speed. I’m consuming podcasts about
psychology, politics, health and nutrition, and
physical activity. Walking my dog while listening to
podcasts is my number one hobby.