Shannon Gair and Sarah McCormick have been awarded Dissertation Completion Fellowships funded by the Graduate School with additional support from the Provost’s Office.
The Dissertation Completion Fellowship was designed by Dean of the Graduate School Jacqueline Urla to help students complete their dissertation after Covid-related disruptions. “Our graduate students have faced so many challenges due to Covid, from loss of access to labs and archives, having to redesign their research, care for small children, and even battling Covid themselves. Despite these challenges they have persevered. This fellowship gives recipients a semester to focus on their research and writing, bring their dissertation to completion, and earn their degree,” said Urla.
Tara Mandalaywala, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences, featured in a PsyPost article.
From "Children more willing to share with White than Black peers, and this may be driven by racial stereotypes about wealth"
A study published in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology found that children were more likely to share their resources with White children than Black children. The effect did not appear to be motivated by in-group bias nor by feelings of warmth toward White children, but by a stereotype that White people are wealthier than Black people.
In a recent project published in Group Processes and Intergroup Relations, Social Psychology alumna Hema Preya Selvanathan ‘19PhD and Associate Professor Bernard Leidner PhD explored how the public is responding to the rise of far-right movements within the United States.
Does “sleeping on it” help us make better decisions? Are sleep disorders just a natural part of aging? How important are naps, anyhow? Rebecca Spencer, Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and director of the UMass Amherst Sleep Monitoring Lab is finding answers to these questions.
Mackenzie Smith '22 combines psychology and political science in her research, which she presented at her field’s most prestigious conference.
Mackenzie Smith, of Westfield, New Jersey, has long been fascinated by how people make decisions and so she chose to major in both psychology and political science at UMass Amherst. “The two fields go hand-in-hand,” she says. “Politics is all about people and how they interact and why—it’s very psychological. I think everyone in politics would benefit from psychology courses.”
Elon Musk. Mark Zuckerberg. Peter Thiel. Steve Jobs. Jack Dorsey. Bill Gates. Jeff Bezos. The tech industry has long suffered from a well-known lack of diversity, but Nilanjana Dasgupta, professor of psychological and brain sciences and director of the Institute of Diversity Sciences (IDS) at UMass Amherst, is part of a group that’s working to change that.
The Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences' Graduate Studies Committee has selected Aanchal Setia (a first year graduate student in the Social Psychology program) to receive the 2021 Edna M. Dahlquist Scholarship.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is an alternate treatment that may prove beneficial to individuals that are not seeing results with CBT. It can also be helpful for changes in life that prove to be trying such as handling grief or loss, transitioning to new role like parent or caregiver, or managing pain. ACT shares some common themes with CBT but relies on a unique idea that there are some things that we can't change, and for those situations, it’s possible to change our attitude towards these struggles.
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The Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences' Graduate Studies Committee has selected 
