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Research has found that it’s more startling to hear a single loud sound than a soft sound followed by a loud sound. This neurological phenomenon is called pre-pulse inhibition and exists so that the body can adapt to loud stimuli when it is supplied with a warning. Allison Reeder ’14 has been awarded a science summer research grant to study pre-pulse inhibition in rats under the direction of Stone Professor of Psychology Douglas Weldon.

Over the past several decades, psychologists have placed a growing level of importance on bringing up children with high self-esteem, but according to the research of Beril Esen ’13, Susannah Parkin ’13 and Jose Mendez ’14, a person’s level of self-esteem is not always what it appears to be.

Pharmaceutical research is usually dominated by corporations and large research universities, but student researchers Hallie Brown ’13, Summer Bottini ’14, Scott Pillette ’14 and Liza Gergenti ’14 are conducting preliminary animal trials on the psychoactive drug Quinpirole as Hamilton undergraduates. They’re studying Quinpirole’s effect on contrafreeloading under the direction of Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology Michael Frederick.

The ability to pick up an object without knocking it over is something that most people take for granted, but Emma Geduldig ’13, Sarah Andrews ’14 and John Wildman ’15 are more inquisitive when it comes to movement and motor control. Why, they ask, do we move to pick up a coffee cup from the side as opposed to the front? Such simple questions on human motion have yet to be entirely answered, and these researchers hope to shed more light on this seldom- researched subject.

Ramya Ramnath ’13 and Sarah Ohanesian ’14 are spending the summer researching brain hemisphere perceptional differences under the direction of Assistant Professor of Psychology Serena Butcher. While many of the questions they are asking seem basic, the implications of their research could be fundamental to scientists’ understanding of the human brain.

Associate Professor of Psychology Jennifer Borton presented an invited lecture titled “Fragile Self-Esteem and the Focus of Attention After Ego Threat” on March 23 at Syracuse University.

Associate Professor of Psychology Jen Borton, students Sam Briggs '12 and Beril Esen '13, and former Hamilton Professor Mark Oakes presented two posters at the annual conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in San Diego in January. Their posters were titled Defensive Self-Esteem and Self-Awareness and Unforgettable: Autobiographical Memories of People with Defensive High Self-Esteem.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Jeremy I. Skipper gave an invited talk in a workshop sponsored by the Experimental Psychology Society (EPS) Jan. 7-8 at University College London. In “Hearing lips and… hands, smiles and print too: How listening to words in the wild is not all that auditory to the brain” he discussed the role of visual contextual cues in the processing of auditory information.

Stone Professor of Psychology Douglas Weldon presented a poster titled “Visual Cortical Evoked Potentials During and After MK-801 Administration in Rats” at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience on Nov. 16 in Washington, D.C.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Jeremy Skipper has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to be used for upgrading lab equipment. The equipment is needed for a project to develop a procedure capable of analyzing brain data resulting from naturalistic stimuli for application to 4-D EEG data.