2006 - 2007 Faculty Advisor Research Grant Winners
Read abstracts of these award winning papers here.
Jonathan F. Bassett received a BA in psychology from Furman University (SC) and a PhD in social psychology from Georgia State University. He is currently assistant professor in the department of psychology at Lander University where he teaches Introductory Psychology, Research Methods, Statistics, and Social Psychology. In 2006, he won Lander University’s Young Faculty Scholar Award. His research interests are in the areas of attitudes about death and dying, measures of implicit social cognition, and interpersonal attraction and jealousy. He is author or coauthor on 17 papers published in peer review journals such as Death Studies, Personality and Individual Differences, and Current Research in Social Psychology.
Matthew R. Kelley is an associate professor at Lake Forest College. He received his PhD in cognitive psychology from Purdue University (IN) and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in developmental neuropsychology at the University of Louisville (KY). Dr. Kelley’s basic memory research is aimed at discovering the general principles that govern memory over both short and long time intervals. In particular, he has focused on how the temporal aspects of events are encoded, maintained, and retrieved by the human memory system. More recently, however, he has explored applications of benchmark memory phenomena (e.g., generation effect in lyrical censorship) and has edited a book entitled Applied Memory, slated for publication in the spring of 2009. The Faculty Advisor Research Grant generated four experiments: one book chapter for Applied Memory, two conference presentations, and one student-authored submission to Psi Chi Journal. Five Lake Forest College undergraduates served as coauthors on the chapter and presentations.
Jonna Kwiatkowski’s main research interest is creativity, which she has explored through cognitive, neurophysiological, as well as educational research. In graduate school, she focused on differences in neuropsychological response (EEG/ERP) to creative tasks. After graduate school, she did post-doctoral research at the PACE Center at Yale University (CT) where she was involved in research on giftedness, alternative assessments of intelligence, and assessments of basic cognitive skills and learning disabilities in Zambia, Africa. Currently, she is interested in using a componential approach to understand creativity. There are various factors that have been independently linked with creativity—novelty seeking, task-switching, and disinhibition—yet there is little known about how these factors might interact during creative thought. We can move towards understanding the interactions between these factors by using well-defined neurophysiological tasks that can be assessed for individual differences in creative potential. In both her teaching and research, Dr. Kwiatkowski is looking for opportunities to interact with students in mutual learning experiences.
Carla J. Reyes received her PhD in 1996 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in counseling/clinical/school psychology with an emphasis on child clinical. While in academia, she served as a Psi Chi advisor for a number of years. She also served two terms as the Psi Chi Rocky Mountain Regional Vice-President, received the Psi Chi Regional Faculty Advisor Award for the Rocky Mountain region in 1999, and was a founding, and now current, member of the Psi Chi Diversity Task Force. In 2006, she was awarded the Early Career Award from RMPA. Her major areas of interests include resiliency, child sexual abuse/childhood trauma, multicultural counseling issues, working with ethnic minority children and families, prevention and intervention for at-risk children, play therapy, and treatment outcomes. She currently is working full time in private practice.
Fang Zhang is currently an assistant professor of psychology at Assumption College. She earned her BA and MA in psychology in China and her PhD in social and personality psychology from Cornell University (NY). Before joining the Assumption College faculty, she worked as a research associate at the Adult Development Lab at Wayne State University (MI). She teaches Introduction to Psychology, Statistics, Personality Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Self Development and Research Seminar.
Her research focuses on three areas: The first area is adult attachment and self development. Specifically, she is interested in the connection between development of the self and attachment security in adulthood and the influence of life experience on this connection. Second, she is interested in the role of nonverbal communication of emotions in relationships. Her third area of research is the influence of culture on self and emotion communication. At this point, she compares the American and the Chinese cultures.