The Academic Minute for 2016.4.11-4.15

Academic Minute from 4.11 – 4.15

Monday, April 11
Scott Glassman – Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine
Shared Medical Appointments
Scott Glassman, PsyD, is a clinical assistant professor of psychology and is associate director of the MS program in Mental Health Counseling and a consultant for the Department of Family Medicine at PCOM. He specializes in the integration of behavioral health into primary care settings.Dr. Glassman teaches osteopathic medical students about patient-centered communication, and has developed patient-centered medical home programs at PCOM’s community-based healthcare centers, which serve as collaborative learning opportunities for PCOM’s psychology and medical students.Among his other areas of focus are: primary care psychology, positive emotions in motivational interviewing, cognitive behavioral approaches and recovery-oriented models of patient care. He has lectured and authored extensively on the topic of motivational interviewing and its use in various settings.

Tuesday, April 12
Daniel Sznycer – Arizona State University
Shame and Social Devaluation
I am an evolutionary psychologist conducting research on the psychology of sociality. I combine methods, theories, and concepts drawn from the cognitive sciences and evolutionary biology to explore and map the evolved design of social emotions and their underlying motivational systems. I have multiple lines of cross-cultural evidence on shame, pride, compassion, and envy, and their roles in altruism, cooperation, social exclusion, and conflict. I am also working to map the system that regulates how much weight one individual places on the welfare of another. I conduct research on how these emotions and motivations regulate political and moral attitudes, and how they shape communication. The methods I use include experimental economic games, decision-making tasks, priming methods, cross-cultural and ethnographic data collection, large-scale representative surveys, and anthropometry.

Wednesday, April 13
Angela Bahns –  Wellesley College
Similarities in Relationships
Angela Bahns, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Wellesley College, is a social psychologist doing research on similarity and diversity in friendship networks and the justification of prejudice. Prof. Bahns’s research seeks to examine the factors that promote diverse friendships and to understand how and when the cognitive and behavioral components of prejudice develop—information that is critical to reducing prejudice and improving intergroup relations. To do this, her research examines attitude similarity and diversity in friendship networks, focusing on the individual-level and community-level factors that affect friendship choices. Prof. Bahns also studies the ways that cognitive factors such as stereotypes and perceptions of threat are used to justify prejudice.

Prof. Bahns holds a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and a B.A. from Pomona College. She was named an Emerging Diversity Scholar by the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan. Prof. Bahns is an active member of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues, the Association of Psychological Science, and the American Psychological Association.

Thursday, April 14
Robert Rosenberger – Georgia Tech University
Phantom Vibration Syndrome
Robert Rosenberger is an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Working in the philosophy of technology and philosophy of science, his approach involves refining philosophical ideas through their application to scientific research, technology design, and policy.

In the philosophy of technology, Rosenberger works from the phenomenological perspective to describe in detail how human experience is structured through the use of technology. These investigations include the analysis of experiences such as talking on the phone, watching television, driving, and using the computer. In an ongoing series of papers, Rosenberger investigates the experience of the use of imaging technologies in scientific practice, with case studies in neurobiology and space science.

In the philosophy of science, Rosenberger studies the nature of scientific debate. His work focuses on the ways scientific debates become institutionalized, how they shift and develop over time, and what epistemological issues follow. In addition, with his colleagues in the Group for Logic and Formal Semantics, Rosenberger explores the philosophy of computer simulation. Their work includes the creation of a graphic measure for robustness in game theory, and computer simulations of social psychological theories of prejudice reduction.

Robert Rosenberger is the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of the book series “Postphenomenology & the Philosophy of Technology” with Lexington Books/Rowman Littlefield Press.  With Peter-Paul Verbeek he has co-edited the book Postphenomenological Investigations: Essays in Human-Technology Relations.  He has also edited the interview book Philosophy of Science: 5 Questions.  He serves as Book Review Editor for the journal Techne: Research in Philosophy and Technology.  And with Stacey Irwin, he is co-curator of the site postphenomenology.org

Friday, April 15
David Frederick – Chapman University
Attractiveness and Mating
Dr. David Frederick is an Assistant Professor of Psychology.  He began teaching at Chapman in 2012.  Growing up in rural upstate New York, he became fascinated with animal behavior, and his original dream was to chase monkeys around Africa as a primatologist.  This spurred him to study how social and biological factors interact to shape the bodies, brains, and preferences of human and nonhuman animals.  He enjoys teaching Research Methods, where students are taught how to use experimental and correlational research designs to understand studies on current issues such as debates over affirmative action and the causes of the wage gap between men and women, to how we can accurately measure people’s emotions.  He also enjoys teaching Human Sexuality, where students learn how hormones, evolved biological systems, and social constructions can explain cross-cultural differences in sexuality, people’s mating preferences, factors shaping sexual orientation, and how doctors respond to intersex babies.