Newman Award Winner Biographies (2000-08)
Rebecca B. Price is a graduate of Stanford University (CA) where she completed an interdisciplinary undergraduate program in symbolic systems— combining coursework in psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. She is currently a 3rd year doctoral student in clinical psychology at Rutgers University (NJ) and a research associate at the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program, Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Her research interests center on the role of neurocognitive factors in the etiology, course, and treatment of emotional disorders. Her ongoing work has examined the relationship between executive functions such as inhibitory control and anxiety symptoms, implicit memory associations in depressed patients with suicidal ideation, and the neural substrates of attentional bias in clinically anxious older adults. She was recently awarded a Predoctoral National Research Service Award from the National Institute of Mental Health to pursue her dissertation research on behavioral and fMRI correlates of late-life generalized anxiety disorder.
2008 Newman Award Abstract
The 2006-07 Newman Award Winner is Darby Saxbe, University of California, Los Angeles, for her research on "Marital Satisfaction, Recovery From Work, and Diurnal Cortisol Among Men and Women." Darby Saxbe is a fourth-year graduate student in clinical and health psychology at UCLA. She grew up in Oberlin, Ohio, and graduated from Yale University (CT) with a double major in English and psychology. Before moving to Los Angeles for graduate school in 2003, Darby spent four years in New York City working in the media industry. Her current research interests include stress physiology, close relationships, and health. For example, she is interested in how "risky family" environments affect adult health through biological and behavioral pathways, and on the impact of the marital interactions on health. She is also interested in the neural and physiological correlates of socioemotional functioning more broadly. In her free time, Darby likes to read, knit, and play guitar.
2007 Newman Award Abstract
Gregory D. Webster was named the winner of the 2005-06 Psi Chi/APA Edwin B. Newman Graduate Research Award. His paper, "The Demise of the Increasingly Protracted Journal Article? Publication Trends in APA Journals, 1986-2004," was presented at the 2005 Master of Arts in Psychology's 50th Anniversary Conference at the College of William & Mary (VA). The research is also currently under review at American Psychologist. Dr. Angela Bryan served as Gregory's research advisor for this project.
Gregory D. Webster was born in Woodstock, New York in 1976. In 1983, he moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he graduated from Holland Hall School in 1994.
Greg received his BA in psychology (cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1997. His undergraduate thesis on music and emotion, coauthored with his advisor Catherine Weir, was recently published (Webster & Weir, 2005, Motivation and Emotion).
Greg received his MA in general psychology from the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia in 2001. Working with his advisor Lee Kirkpatrick, he has published two articles examining the association between domain-specific self-esteem and aggression (Kirkpatrick, Waugh, Valencia, & Webster, 2002, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology; Webster & Kirkpatrick, 2006, Aggressive Behavior).
Greg is currently a PhD candidate in social psychology at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In collaboration with his mentor, Angela Bryan, he has published an article on exercise and mood (Rocheleau, Webster, Bryan, & Frazier, 2004). Greg is currently writing his doctoral dissertation on family-based resource allocation. His primary research interests involve studying prosocial behavior (Webster, 2003, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology; Webster, 2004, Evolutionary Psychology) and aggression (Webster, 2006, Representative Research in Social Psychology) from an evolutionary social psychological perspective.
Starting in July of 2006, Greg will be a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's NIMH-funded training program in quantitative methods for behavioral research.
2006 Newman Award Abstract
George M. Slavich was named the winner of the 2004-05 Psi Chi/APA Edwin B. Newman Graduate Research Award. His paper, "Physiological Correlates of Severe Life Stress in Clinical Depression," was presented at the 2005 APA/ Psi Chi National Convention in Washington, D.C. Scott M. Monroe, PhD, served as George's research advisor for this project.
George M. Slavich is originally from Santa Clara, CA and is currently a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Oregon. He completed undergraduate and graduate coursework at Stanford University, earning a bachelor's degree in psychology, a master's degree in personality psychology, and a master's degree in communication. The following year, he received a master's degree in clinical psychology from the University of Oregon.
Mr. Slavich's research interests focus on mood disorders, with a particular emphasis on major depressive disorder. In this line of work, he investigates the roles that life stress, cognitive biases, physiological, and neurobiological factors play in the genesis and maintenance of depression.
Mr. Slavich is also a devoted teacher and mentor. Since 1996 he has taught more than 1,800 students in 19 different courses; in 2001, he founded the Stanford Undergraduate Psychology Conference; and in 2002, he founded the Western Psychological Association Student Council.
Mr. Slavich has been honored for distinguished scholarship, research, teaching, and service. Most recently, he received the Society for Research in Psychopathology Smadar Levin Award (Honorable Mention) and the Psi Chi/American Psychological Society Albert Bandura Graduate Research Award.
Mr. Slavich's career plans include obtaining a faculty position at a university devoted to excellence in research and teaching.
2005 Newman Award Abstract
Cortney S. Warren was named the winner of the 2003-04 Psi Chi/ APA Edwin B. Newman Graduate Research Award. Her paper, "Thin-Ideal Awareness and Internalization: Culture as a Moderating Variable," was presented at the 2004 APA/Psi Chi National Convention in Honolulu, Hawaii. David H. Gleaves, PhD, served as Cortney's research advisor for this project.
Cortney Soderlind Warren was born on October 18, 1977, in Kutztown, Pennsylvania. As the child of two college professors, she was instantly immersed into the world of academia. At her alma mater, Macalester College (St. Paul, Minnesota) Ms.Warren developed a strong interest in eating disorders. Under the exceptional mentoring of Drs. Jaine Strauss and Nancy C. Raymond, she undertook supporting research activities that resulted in various conference presentations and publications. She graduated magna cum laude in 2000, with majors in psychology and Spanish.
In 2001, Ms. Warren entered the doctoral program in clinical psychology at Texas A & M University to work with Dr. David H. Gleaves. Ms. Warren's research explores cultural factors that influence the development, maintenance, and perpetuation of eating disorder symptomatology. Her most recent research project, for which she won this award, examines ethnicity as a protective factor against body image disturbance.
Ms. Warren is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Psi Chi, Phi Kappa Phi, and Sigma Delta Phi and is financially supported by a Minority Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services Fellowship from the American Psychological Association (2002-2005).
2004 Newman Award Abstract
Rose Mary Webb was named the winner of the 2002-03 Psi Chi/APA Edwin B. Newman Graduate Research Award. Ms. Webb began her graduate career at Iowa State University in the lab of David Lubinski and Camilla Benbow, who codirect the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, a longitudinal study of the exceptional intellectual talent founded in 1972 by Julian C. Stanley at Johns Hopkins University. After her second year of study, Mrs. Webb joined her coadvisors in a move to Vanderbilt University (TN).
Under the joint mentorship of Lubinski and Benbow, Ms. Webb completed her master's work, which tracked the educational-vocational development of 1,110 adolescents who, at the age of 13, were identified as at least the top 1% in ability and who, at the age of 18, reported plans for an undergraduate major in a math or science domain (Webb, Lubinski, & Benbow, 2002). They found that women were more likely than men to change their undergraduate majors to domains outside math or science, and that these differences were partially explained by the individuals' pattern of specific abilities and interests.
For example, Ms. Webb et al. documented that, on average, the highly able women in their study had more similar math and verbal abilities than their male counterparts, whose math abilities were markedly more pronounced than their verbal abilities. This finding was supported by findings in Webb's earlier collaborative research, which found that mathematically able women tended to be more verbally talented than equally mathematically able men (Lubinski, Webb, Benbow, & Morelock, 2001). Moreover, participant sex explained only 1% of the variance between those who did and those who did not complete a math-science undergraduate degree, and after controlling for ability and interest variables; participant sex contributed no incremental explanation of degree group membership.
Webb et al. found that both women and men who chose to change their undergraduate majors to domains outside math-science reported levels of career satisfaction, career success, and life satisfaction that were similar to those of women and men who remained in math-science disciplines. These findings challenge the untested presumption in much of the current literature that individuals who leave the math-science pipeline are underachieving. This work was published in the Journal of Educational Psychology, was highlighted in the November 15, 2002 issue of Science, won the Susan W. Gray Award for Excellence in Scholarly Writing, and was the basis for Ms. Webb's selection as the 2002–2003 Psi Chi/APA Edwin B. Newman Graduate Research Award recipient.
Complementing Ms. Webb's empirical work are a chapter and a comment. The chapter, coauthored with her graduate advisor, David Lubinski, reviewed findings from the major domains of differential psychology research (Lubinski & Webb, 2003). The comment, coauthored with April Bleske-Rechek, a research associate for SMPY, was a methodological critique of a report on female psychologists in the academy (Bleske-Rechek & Webb, 2002).
Ms. Webb is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University. Her dissertation involves the three major domains of individual differences: cognitive abilities, interests, and personality. Previous researchers have found unique patterns of correlations among many of the dimensions of abilities, interests, and personality and have defined a number of trait constellations from these patterns. Ms. Webb anticipates identifying these constellations of attributes in intellectually precocious adolescents and then using this information to predict contrasting long-term developmental trajectories. She hopes that her findings will eventually help to refine developmentally appropriate learning opportunities for intellectually talented youth. She plans to continue to examine the implications of individual and group differences in cognitive domains and to study the development of intellectual talent, particularly mathematical talent, across the lifespan.
2003 Newman Award Abstract
Micheal E. Shafer was named the winner of the 2001-02 Psi Chi/APA Edwin B. Newman Graduate Research Award. His paper, "Self-Concept Among Mexican American Boys and Girls: Validating the Self-Description Questionnaire - I," was presented at the meeting of the Texas State Psychological Association. Craig S. Neumann, PhD, and Patricia L. Kaminski, PhD, served as research advisors for this paper.
Micheal E. Shafer is currently a graduate student in the clinical psychology program at the University of North Texas (UNT). Prior to enrolling at UNT, he received a master's degree in applied psychology at the University of Baltimore, in Maryland. While at the University of Baltimore, he gained a considerable amount of experience working as a research assistant in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Maryland Medical School. Mr. Shafer was also fortunate enough to work on several projects that were developed to improve the delivery of mental health services to inner-city children. He is currently interested in research that examines factors contributing to school violence, the development of self-concept, service utilization for minority children, and the psychological effects of traumatic experiences. In addition, Mr. Shafer has become interested in recent advancements in neuropsychology, particularly correlates between brain trauma and the development of emotional and behavioral problems.
2002 Newman Award Abstract
Su Yeong Kim of the Human Development Graduate Program at the University of California, Davis, is the winner of the 2000-01 Psi Chi/APA Edwin B. Newman Graduate Research Award. Ms. Kim was honored as the only student research award recipient at the prestigious annual APF/APA awards ceremony, held in conjunction with the recent APA Convention in San Francisco. Ms. Kim's award-winning research paper illuminates the family processes associated with adolescent mental health in an understudied minority population. The study is the first to demonstrate a family process triggered by mothers' and fathers' depressed moods in predicting Chinese American adolescent depressive symptoms. The paper, entitled "Parenting Practices and Adolescent Depressive Symptoms in Chinese American Families," was published in the September 2000 issue of the Journal of Family Psychology. Xiaojia Ge, PhD, served as research advisor and coauthor of the paper.
Influenced by Ge's theoretically and methodologically rigorous papers on the impact of economic stress on family relationships and adolescent developmental outcomes, Kim designed a study to examine similar issues in an understudied minority population of Chinese Americans. This led Kim and Ge to write a paper together on the role of parenting practices in Chinese American adolescents' depressive symptoms. Kim and Ge's Journal of Family Psychology paper is the first study to demonstrate a family process triggered by mothers' and fathers' depressive symptoms in predicting adolescent depressive symptoms among Chinese Americans. As such, it provides useful information for designing an effective prevention and intervention program to reduce Asian American adolescent emotional problems. Findings from this study indicate that improving Asian American parents' mental health represents a strategically important first step in preventing adolescent emotional problems, since both mothers' and father's depressive symptoms can set in motion a family process that leads to adolescent depressive symptoms. Furthermore, an effective program for emotionally distressed parents should attempt to improve their parenting practices. Increasing parental involvement, monitoring efforts, and inductive reasoning while reducing harsh disciplinary practices can be expected to reduce adolescent depressive symptoms. Adolescents' perceived improvement in their parents' disciplinary practices is expected to significantly reduce the amount of psychological distress experienced by Chinese American adolescents.
At UC Davis, Kim was also involved with the National Research Center on Asian American Mental Health, a center funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. Kim cultivated her interest in ethnicity and mental health through lively research forums and seminars held at the center. She also joined the director of the center, Stanley Sue, PhD, to publish a paper on mental health policy im-plications for Asian Pacific Americans.
Kim is currently a doctoral candidate conducting her dissertation research. She is examining how variations in acculturation levels within the family lead to differential patterns of adolescent adjustment such as mental health and academic achievement. The results from the study should provide insights into the ways family-level acculturation relates to parent - child relationships and to various indicators of adolescent adjustment in Chinese immigrant families. The dissertation study has received funding through the Ruth G. and Joseph D. Matarazzo Scholarship from the American Psychological Foundation/Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology, and the Scott Mesh Honorary Scholarship for Research in Psychology from the American Psychological Association of Graduate Students.
Kim's future goals involve continuing her research on Asian American adolescents and families in an academic setting while being involved with the Asian American community. She would also like to expand her research on Asian American adolescents to include minority adolescents from diverse backgrounds. She has begun this endeavor with Ruth K. Chao, PhD, as they are preparing a paper on the association between language maintenance and ethnic identity in Chinese American and Mexican American adolescents.
2001 Newman Award Abstract
Laura Mackner was named the winner of the 1999-2000 Psi Chi/APA Edwin B. Newman Graduate Research Award. She presented her paper, "The Cognitive Development of Children in Poverty with Adequate and Deficient Growth," at the Seventh Florida Conference on Child Health Psychology in April 1999. Raymond H. Starr, Jr., PhD, and Maureen Black, PhD, served as research advisors for this paper.
The research and writing of this paper were conducted when Dr. Mackner was a graduate student at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. She received her PhD in the summer of 1999 after completing her clinical internship at the University of Maryland Medical System. She is currently working with Lori Stark, PhD, as a postdoctoral fellow in pediatric psychology at Children's Hospital Medical Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her clinical and research interests include developmental outcomes and intervention programs for children with pediatric and psychosocial and environmental challenges.
Under the mentorship of Drs. Starr and Black, Dr. Mackner's primary research in graduate school was part of a multisite federally funded project investigating failure to thrive (FTT) and neglect. Her master's thesis found that low-income children with FTT who are also neglected perform significantly lower on cognitive tests than children who are only neglected, children who are only failing to thrive, and children with neither condition. This finding highlighted the importance of carefully assessing risk factors such as neglect when FTT has been identified. This work was published in the July 1997 issue of Child Abuse and Neglect. Dr. Mackner continued to investigate the developmental course of children with FTT for her dissertation. She received a University-Based Doctoral Student and Faculty Fellowship in Child Abuse and Neglect grant from the National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (NCCAN) to fund this research. This study, for which she won the Newman Award, longitudinally examined the cognitive development of children in poverty with and without a history of growth failure. The pattern of cognitive development found in this study was particularly interesting. The cognitive development of children with FTT declined between 15 and 49 months of age and was significantly lower than that of children with adequate growth. However, at 61 and 74 months of age, their cognitive scores increased and were no longer significantly lower than the scores of children with adequate growth. Additionally, a child-centered home environment protected against the risk for lowered cognitive performance.
Dr. Mackner has continued to pursue her interest in growth and nutrition during her postdoctoral fellowship. Under the mentorship of Dr. Stark, Dr. Mackner's current research focuses on intervention programs aimed at improving nutrition for children with chronic illnesses such as cystic fibrosis and juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. She recently wrote a review paper on adherence to dietary recommendations in pediatric conditions. Dietary modification is an important component in the treatment of many pediatric diseases, yet adherence rates are low and few intervention programs targeting increased dietary adherence exist.
Clinically, Dr. Mackner has pursued interests in pediatric illness, child maltreatment, and child development. She has worked extensively with children with acute and chronic illnesses, focusing on pain management, adherence to medical regimens, feeding issues, and behavioral and emotional issues associated with chronic illness. She has also worked with children in foster care, and she enjoys conducting psychological evaluations with children with cognitive, behavioral and/or emotional difficulties.
Dr. Mackner's future goal involves pursuing a career in pediatric psychology in academic medicine. She plans to continue to conduct both research and clinical work, and to continue to investigate developmental outcomes and intervention programs for children facing pediatric, psychosocial, and environmental challenges.
2000 Newman Award Abstract