The Department of Psychology specializes in nine areas of research and training: Behavioral Neuroscience, Clinical Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Neuroscience, Decision Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, Quantitative Psychology, and Social Psychology. Learn more about each below.
Behavioral Neuroscience Faculty Labs
For information about lab opportunities, please contact Liz McGinnis at mcginnis.20089@osu.edu (undergraduate students) or Mary Jones at jones.3308@osu.edu (graduate students).
Faculty: Laurence Coutellier
Researches how circuits of the prefrontal cortex regulate emotional and cognitive functions throughout the lifespan, as well as factors that can alter these circuits and their implications in neuropsychiatric and neurological diseases.
Faculty: Liz Kirby
Researches the role of hippocampal neural stem and progenitor cells (NSPCs) in modulating the hippocampal response to environmental stimuli.
Faculty: Kathryn Lenz
Conducts research on how the brain develops and changes during flexible periods of life: before birth, during childhood, adolescence, and pregnancy.
Faculty: Benedetta Leuner
Conducts preclinical research to address issues and questions that are specific to the female brain and women’s brain health.
Clinical Psychology Faculty Labs
For information about lab opportunities, please contact Liz McGinnis at mcginnis.20089@osu.edu (undergraduate students) or Mary Jones at jones.3308@osu.edu (graduate students).
Faculty: Jennifer Bogner
Faculty: Scott Hayes
Examines modifiable lifestyle variables that are associated with optimal cognitive performance and brain health, including aerobic fitness, strength, spatiotemporal gait metrics, balance, sleep and nutrition.
Faculty: Ruchika Prakash
Trains the next generation of clinical scientists devoted to the study of evidence-based lifestyle interventions, neuropsychology and neuroimaging.
Faculty: Daniel Strunk
Studies the role of cognition in abnormal emotional states, including in the etiology and treatment of depression.
Faculty: Nicholas Breitborde
Faculty: Jennifer Cheavens
Conducts research on mood and personality, with projects on kindness, hope, emotion regulation, social media and interpersonal emotion regulation.
Faculty: Jasmeet Hayes
Uses cognitive neuroscience techniques, such as MRI, to conduct research on the impact of traumatic brain injury (TBI) and psychological stress on the brain and overall health outcomes.
Faculty: Cynthia Gerhardt
Faculty: Janice Kiecolt-Glaser
Faculty: Barbara Andersen
Conducts innovative research on the bio-behavioral aspects of cancer in order to improve the psychological well-being and health of cancer patients.
Faculty: Aubrey Moe
Faculty: Kristen Carpenter
Conducts research on risk factors for sexual and psychological maladjustment in gynecologic and breast cancer patients during various stages of diagnosis, treatment and survivorship.
Cognitive Psychology Faculty Labs
For information about lab opportunities, please contact Liz McGinnis at mcginnis.20089@osu.edu (undergraduate students) or Mary Jones at jones.3308@osu.edu (graduate students).
Faculty: Roger Ratcliff and Gail McKoon
Conducts research on the processes underlying representation and decision making, with current focuses on memory, perception and numeracy.
Faculty: Richard Jagacinski
Investigates the cognitive processes underlying action, such as attention, perception and memory, and develops new measurement techniques and mathematical models so that these dynamic processes can be understood in greater detail.
Faculty: Andrew Leber
Investigates the neural and cognitive factors that behind flexible control of behavior.
Faculty: Alexander Petrov
Faculty: Mark Pitt
Conducts research on the brain mechanisms engaged in verbal communication, particularly those involved in recognition.
Faculty: Brandon Turner
Employs cognitive models to investigate how the brain produces behavior.
Faculty: Julie Golomb
Investigates how the brain perceives and codes objects and their spatial locations, as well as how eye movement, shifts of attention, and other top-down factors affect these representations.
Faculty: Zeynep Saygin
Conducts research on how the human brain develops and changes with experience.
Cognitive Neuroscience Faculty Labs
For information about lab opportunities, please contact Liz McGinnis at mcginnis.20089@osu.edu (undergraduate students) or Mary Jones at jones.3308@osu.edu (graduate students).
Faculty: Andrew Leber
Investigates the neural and cognitive factors that behind flexible control of behavior.
Faculty: Baldwin Way
Investigates how psychological factors trigger the immune system and how the immune system can alter emotions and decision-making.
Faculty: Dylan Wagner
Investigates how humans take disparate facts and observations about other people and weave these into complex and multidimensional character portraits, which form the basis of our person knowledge.
Faculty: Julie Golomb
Investigates how the brain perceives and codes objects and their spatial locations, as well as how eye movement, shifts of attention, and other top-down factors affect these representations.
Faculty: Scott Hayes
Examines modifiable lifestyle variables that are associated with optimal cognitive performance and brain health, including aerobic fitness, strength, spatiotemporal gait metrics, balance, sleep and nutrition.
Developmental Psychology Faculty Labs
For information about lab opportunities, please contact Liz McGinnis at mcginnis.20089@osu.edu (undergraduate students) or Mary Jones at jones.3308@osu.edu (graduate students).
Faculty: Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan
Studies families as a primary context for young children’s social and emotional development.
Faculty: Vladimir Sloutsky
Explores how and why cognition changes in the course of development and learning.
Faculty: Laura Wagner
Investigates how children acquire language, and in particular, how they learn about meaning.
Faculty: John E. Opfer
Faculty: Stephen Petrill
Examines the development of the cognitive processes related to language, reading and mathematics from the behavioral genetic perspective.
Faculty: John Gibbs
Conducts research on sociomoral development, prosocial behavior and complex social interactions.
Faculty: Zeynep Saigin
Conducts research on how the human brain develops and changes with experience.
Quantitative Psychology Faculty Labs
For information about lab opportunities, please contact Liz McGinnis at mcginnis.20089@osu.edu (undergraduate students) or Mary Jones at jones.3308@osu.edu (graduate students).
Faculty: Trisha Van Zandt
Explores changes to the cognitive system in response to stimuli over time.
Faculty: Andrew Hayes
Develops, evaluates, and disseminates research and practical statistical methods and tools for understanding the processes by which causal effects operate (mediation) and the circumstances, contexts or individual differences that influence the magnitude of those effects (moderation).
Social Psychology Faculty Labs
For information about lab opportunities, please contact Liz McGinnis at mcginnis.20089@osu.edu (undergraduate students) or Mary Jones at jones.3308@osu.edu (graduate students).
Faculty: Richard Petty and Duane Wegener
Investigates the situational and individual difference factors responsible for changes in beliefs, attitudes and behaviors.
Faculty: Russ Fazio
Investigates basic social psychological phenomena like attitude formation, attitude change and the relationship between attitudes and behavior, as well as the automatic and controlled processes that guide social behavior.
Faculty: Brittany Shoots-Reinhard
Conducts research on judgment and decision making, attitudes and persuasion, and motivation, with current projects focused on antecedents and consequences of objective and subjective numeracy, factors influencing the efficacy of risk and science communications, political polarization and driver psychology.
Faculty: Kentaro Fujita
Investigates how motivation (what we want) and cognition (how we think) interact to determine our evaluations, judgments and behavioral decisions.
Faculty: Steven Spencer
Conducts research on processes related to the self, identity and motivation, focusing in particular on how these processes affect stereotyping and prejudice.
Faculty: Baldwin Way
Investigates how psychological factors trigger the immune system and how the immune system can alter emotions and decision-making.
Faculty: Dylan Wagner
Investigates how humans take disparate facts and observations about other people and weave these into complex and multidimensional character portraits, which form the basis of our person knowledge.
Faculty: Lisa Libby
Investigates the mental processes underlying people’s subjective perceptions of the world and of themselves.