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  About the Department

The UC Psychology Department is home to nearly 30 accomplished faculty members who teach and conduct research; 80 graduate students pursuing the doctorate in psychology; and over 600 undergraduate majors.

The department is driven by the research programs of the faculty. This engine for scholarship attracts scholars to Greater Cincinnati, who in turn attract top-flight graduate students. At the undergraduate level, our majors are taught by active researchers who can bring the excitement of the scientific quest into the classroom and who can provide invaluable hands-on experience for majors who are interested in pursing careers in psychology.

The UC Psychology Department is organized to support research excellence in three primary areas: health psychology, experimental/human factors, and neuropsychology. Following are some of the major research programs in the department.

Health Psychology

Health psychology is concerned with understanding the impact of psychological processes on health and illness.  Our health psychology faculty are studying

  • Effective community-based interventions that facilitate psychosocial adaptation to illness and disease; prevention research.
  • The interplay of personality, cognitive, and social behaviors as they relate to the initiation and maintenance of addictive processes.
  • The effectiveness of brief interventions for socially anxious drinkers; concurrent generalized anxiety and heavy drinking; cognitive mediators of negative affect and heavy drinking.
  • The diagnosis of schizophrenia and other disorders in African American individuals; psychosocial correlates of sickle cell disease.
  • Psychological mechanisms underlying regulation and dysregulation of physiological state; psychophysiological, affective, and motivational mediators of psychological and physical disorders; mechanisms through which stress results in dysfunction.

Experimental/Human Factors

Human factors engineering is an interdisciplinary endeavor to design tools and systems that are safe and effective. We are working in the areas of

  • Personality and mood effects on attention and performance; stress and fatigue effects on vehicle driving performance; and the relationship between emotion and attentional processes.
  • The organization of perception and action in the control of posture, concentrating on the management of postural motion to meet criteria set by supra-postural tasks.
  • Human perceptual-motor coordination, control, and learning (examples of coordinated actions of interest are maintaining upright posture, aimed movements to a target, and rhythmic movements).
  • Sustained attention (vigilance).
  • Human factors in endoscopic surgery.
  • Taste and smell perception.
  • Haptic perception.

Neuropsychology

Neuropsychologists study the relationships between brain function and cognitive and emotional processing.  Our faculty are focusing on studies of

  • The neuropsychology of bipolar disorder and other serious psychiatric disorders, using cognitive tasks as well as structural and functional neuroimaging.

  • Neurocognitive/mood consequences of drug use; gender differences in cognition and brain structure; adolescent brain development; neuroimaging methodology.

  • Processing of facial and vocal expressions of emotion in patients with serious mental illness.

  • The neuropsychology of epilepsy; application of behavioral self-regulation methods in epilepsy and brain-injured patients.

  • The development of the mind and the brain in cognition (e.g., developmental cognitive neuroscience), particularly in the late pre-school years and early grade school years.

  • Perception and memory of environmental sounds and other auditory stimuli in selected clinical populations and elderly subjects.

  • Clinical assessment of the sense of smell and the relationship of smell loss to neuropsychiatric disease.
   

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