Fast Facts Number of Ph.D. students : 15 Number of M.S. students: 1 Financial support up to five years. Program requirements: coursework, general exam, research, and thesis.

Psychology

The Department of Psychology offers distinctive research-intensive M.S. and Ph.D. programs with a focus on Human Cognition and Development. Training is provided by a core curriculum and specialization in one of three intersecting clusters: Cognition and Language, Social Cognition and Personality, and Social and Cognitive Development. Note: For degrees in counseling psychology and school psychology, please contact the College of Education).

The department's research specialties include:

Cognition and Language: Broad training in cognitive psychology and psychology of language. Strengths in fundamental cognitive processes include cognitive control, attention, language, memory, and memory reconsolidation. Language topics include concepts and word meanings, production processes, sequence learning, bilingual word learning, and cross-linguistic analysis. Special expertise also in foundational issues in cognitive science. (Central faculty include: Arrington, Bickhard, Hupbach, Malt, and O’Seaghdha.)

Social and Cognitive Development: Research covers many central developmental topics, including cognitive, metacognitive, and perceptual development; sociocultural and narrative development; development of moral affect and behavior, attachment relationships, and emotional and social understanding; lifespan development. (Central faculty include: Barrett, Bickhard, Hyland, Laible, and Nicolopoulou.)

Social Cognition and Personality: Consideration of how social cognition, emotion, and behavior stem from situational influences, individual differences, and information processing mechanisms. Current emphases include conscious and unconscious influences on social judgment; prejudice and stereotypes; social explanation and social emotions; prosocial cognition, emotion, and behavior; goals, motivation, and self-regulation; stress and coping, social support, and bereavement; social-cognitive changes associated with aging and health status, including coping and depression. (Central faculty include: Burke, Gill, Grant, Hyland, Moskowitz, and Packer.)

Facilities/Resources
Cognitive, developmental, and social psychology laboratories, many of them recently renovated, are located in Chandler Ullmann Hall. They are equipped with state-of-the-art computer and recording facilities for research. Research participants for studies on adults are drawn from the in-house participant pool. Infants, children, and older adults are recruited in the amply populated Lehigh Valley. Substantial off-site data collection and research is conducted in area schools and hospitals and in the Lehigh University Child Care Facility.

A low graduate student-to-faculty ratio ensures that students work closely with the advisor. The program also draws on the expertise of affiliated faculty in biology, computer science, education, sociology and anthropology, and philosophy, many of whom are connected with the Cognitive Science Program.

Examples of graduate research projects:

• How attachment security influences the quality and frequency of mother-toddler conflict
• Working memory in multitask environments and the influence of mind wandering on task selection and performance
• Automatic and controlled processes in stereotyping and prejudice
• Adolescent conscience: links with aggressive and prosocial behavior
• Phonological features in word production
• Social explanatory styles and their relation to dispositional sympathy
• Development of self and identity in young children through the prism of narrative
• Bilingual word learning
• Relation between learning goals and prosocial interaction in groups

Length of typical graduate program, and types of jobs obtained by graduates:
Students are strongly encouraged to complete the M.S. program in two years and the Ph.D. program in the allotted five years of financial support. Median time to completion is approximately six years.

Students are trained primarily for research and teaching positions in university and liberal arts colleges as well as relevant nonacademic settings. Over the past three years several of our graduating students have secured positions at liberal arts colleges (e.g., Fairfield University, Lafayette College, Neumann College, University of Wisconsin-Stout, East Stroudsburg University). Other graduates moved initially to postdoctoral training positions upon graduation. Examples of recent nonacademic placements include analyst with a research group and research engineer with a leading software company.