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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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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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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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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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.