Cialdini Fellows will receive a stipend of $5,000 per year, in addition to their departmental teaching/research/project assistantship salaries. Contingent on satisfactory progress and maintenance of good standing in the program, each awardee’s $5,000 fellowship will be renewable annually for a total of four years of support (i.e., 2020-2021 through 2023-2024: a total of $20,000). Click here for more information on various funding opportunities for applicants in the Department of Psychology.

51���� Psychology Graduate Admissions – uwmpsych@uwm.edu | 414-229-4747

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The competition was hosted by the Graduate School and the Office of Research. Originally developed by the University of Queensland, the purpose of the competition is to have students cultivate their presentation and research communication skills, while effectively explaining their research projects in three minutes to a non-specialist audience. The competition drew approximately 70 competitors, who participated in qualifying rounds during March.

Fourteen finalists were chosen and presented their 3MT talks on April 10th in the 51���� Union in front of 4 judges. As a winner, Abel was awarded a $1,500 prize.

This is the second time 51����’s Department of Psychology has obtained 1st place at the 3MT competition. Congratulations to Abel for representing the department so well!

You can watch his outstanding 3MT talk at /graduateschool/3mt/.

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This competition was sponsored by the Graduate School, Office of Research, and 51���� Research Foundation, and originally developed by the University of Queensland to cultivate students’ academic, presentation, and research communication skills. Participation enriches the capacity of students to effectively explain their graduate research projects in three minutes, in a language appropriate to a non-specialist audience. 51����’s first competition drew nearly 100 contestants, who participated in qualifying rounds last month.

The top 14 finalists presented their 3MT talks April 4^th in the Zelazo Center before an audience and panel of 4 judges.  Hanna Yousuf, also a Psychology department graduate student, was a finalist another and delivered an outstanding talk as well. As winner, Lisa was awarded a $1,500 prize. Their presentations may be viewed at: /graduateschool/3mt/.

Congratulations to Lisa and thanks to her and Hanna for representing the department so well!!

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Stephan is building on these findings with his new dissertation study, which aims to determine if TAF-focused CBM-I can outperform a credible psychological comparison condition, stress management psychoeducation (SMP).  SMP is a standard part of many emotional disorder treatments, and has shown relation to reductions in obsession severity without directly targeting TAF.

This is an exciting line of research as CBM-I displays promise as a potential complementary training to current empirically supported interventions. Therefore, if findings in the dissertation study are promising, the next step would be to determine the trainings efficacy in a clinical OCD population. Moreover, developing CBM-I for TAF has the potential for adaption to mobile technology (smart phones and tablets), which can be done in the privacy of one’s home, with no current cost associated with the trainings.

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It has been suggested that response inhibition (the ability to inhibit a pre-potent response) deficits may play a role in the etiology and maintenance of obsessive-compulsive and related disorders (OCRDs), due to shared features of the disorders related to impulsivity.  Extant research examining the role of response inhibition deficits in these conditions has been correlational in nature.  Using computerized cognitive tasks, Ashleigh will examine response inhibition and OCRD symptoms across multiple time points to provide better insight into a direction of potential causality.

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Concerns about the high rates of sexual assault on college campuses have led to a large increase in relevant research. Yet, the current literature is limited about the ethical implications of conducting research with college sexual assault victims. The paper addresses ethical dilemmas and provides recommendations for researchers study college sexual assault.

As the prize winner, Cari’s paper was presented at the APA Annual Convention and has been published in the journal Ethics and Behavior.

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Octavio is currently finishing his internship at the South Texas Veterans Health Care System in San Antonio, TX, and has recently been accepted to the Clinical Neuropsychology Fellowship at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, FL. His doctoral and internship training has offered him well-balanced generalist and specialty experiences, including evidence-based individual/group psychotherapy and neuropsychological assessment in English/Spanish with diverse neurological, psychiatric, and medical populations in community, university, and hospital settings. His professional interests include addressing challenges in assessment and treatment of culturally and linguistically diverse populations, particularly in the Hispanic/Latino community. Being bilingual-bicultural, he strives to respond to the rapidly growing need to develop and provide culturally sensitive neuropsychological services to Hispanics and other underserved populations.

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Given that clients often terminate exposure therapy for a number of reasons (e.g., fear or apprehension about the difficulty and intensity of the treatment), attempts to enhance the palatability of exposure-based treatment (without sacrificing intervention potency) are important. Thus, examination of the benign and/or facilitative role of safety behaviors as an adjunct to traditional exposure therapy is a promising research avenue.

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Adam Barnas and Dr. Greenberg have a new manuscript accepted for publication in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics in which they assess the role of the visual field meridians in how attention selects object information. Object-based attention (OBA) enhances processing within the boundaries of a selected object. Larger OBA effects have been observed for horizontal compared to vertical rectangles. Adam & Dr. Greenberg aimed to elucidate the modulatory role of the meridians on OBA. This study sought to examine how the reallocation of object-based attention within a cued object, and between cued and non-cued objects, varies as a function of crossing the horizontal and vertical meridians. Results demonstrate that OBA is allocated unevenly within objects that cross the screen meridians, regardless of whether those shifts take place within a cued object or between two objects. These findings necessitate the updating of OBA theories to include effects of crossing the horizontal and vertical visual field meridians, as well as the locations of the object and cue within the visual field.

Whether or not you’re aware of it, attention guides virtually all behavior and decisions as we interact with our environment. The underlying mechanisms that control attentional guidance is currently underspecified. In this study, Adam Barnas & Dr. Greenberg have provided new details concerning the conditions under which attention selects information on the basis of objects. Specifically, there seems to be an imbalance between shifts of object-based attention, but only when crossing the vertical or horizontal midline of the visual field. In line with these findings, Dr. Greenberg’s lab is continuing to explore related questions about attentional selection of objects.

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Graduate student Tara Miskovich and Colleagues published a new study in the journal PLOS One that examined abnormalities in cortical folding associated with trait anxiety. Dispositional anxiety is a personality trait that is associated with mental health disorders, such as anxiety and depression. Miskovich and Colleagues present evidence that trait anxiety is associated with abnormal cortical folding in the precuneus, a key node of the default mode network, a brain network that subserves self-focused thinking. Cortical folding is thought to reflect underlying cortical connectivity that occurs during early neurodevelopment. Therefore, trait anxiety may be associated with disrupted connectivity within this network, putting anxious individuals at risk for developing mental health disorders.

These results are consistent with studies examining cortical folding in clinical samples of anxiety and depression. This may indicate that folding abnormalities in the precuneus found in clinical populations are actually associated with this broader trait vulnerability to developing one of these disorders.

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