Psychwatch - Northwestern University

Distinguished Faculty Profile:Renee Engeln-MaddoxThis year Renee Engeln-Maddox receivedthe Charles Deering McCormick UniversityDistinguished Lecturer award. The awardrecognizes faculty members who have consistently demonstrated outstanding performance inclassroom teaching or have developed significantinnovations that have influenced the teachingeffectiveness of others. Faculty members arenominated for a McCormick award by the Deanof their school. Nominations are reviewed by acommittee chaired by the Provost and made of upof senior faculty members, administrators, and astudent representative. Appointments are madeby the President of Northwestern. Only six facultymembers per year (three for distinguished tenuredfaculty and three for distinguished lecturers) arehonored McCormick awards. They are the University’s highest and only University-wide awards forteaching excellence.Dr. Engeln-Maddox will begin her sixth yearof teaching at Northwestern this fall. Since arrivingin 2006 she has quickly made a name for herself asone of the most popular and beloved teachers inthe Psychology Department. She teaches elevendifferent courses on a variety of topics rangingfrom Research Methods to the Psychology ofBeauty. Her courses also range from lectures withhundreds of students to small, intimate seminars.The Psychology Department chair, Dan McAdams,says of her, “she can teach nearly anything and nomatter what she teaches, the students give heroverwhelmingly stellar marks.” Dr. Engeln-Maddoxis known for both challenging her students andbeing accessible with detailed feedback and individual meetings outside of scheduled office hours.In addition to helping with coursework, Dr. EngelnMaddox gives her time to mentoring studentsprofessionally and personally.Prior to receiving the McCormick Dr. Engeln-Maddox won theWeinberg College AlumniTeaching award in 2009.She has also been namedto the Associated StudentGovernment FacultyHonor Roll since 2007.During her time at LoyolaUniversity she won theEdwin T. and Vivijeane F.Sujack Award for TeachingExcellence. Dr. EngelnMaddox has amongthe best CTECs (Courseand Teacher EvaluationCouncil’s student feedback) in Northwestern’sPsychology department.The student newspaper,North by Northwestern,quoted a student saying,“Dr. Maddox is nothingshort of hilarious- her CTECs read like a love letter,but it isn’t that she’s funny. She understands howto communicate information in a way that’s understandable, interesting and exciting. When I studiedfor her infamously challenging (but fair!) exams, Iwasn’t cramming in facts that I’d forget the nextday; I wanted to do well on those tests because Ifelt like I had really learned.”Dr. Engeln-Maddox’s primary research interests involve objectification theory, body image andthe media. She explores the link between imagesof women in the media and women’s perceptionabout their own bodies. She also tests proposedmediators, moderators and outcomes of Objectification Theory such as why women “talk back”to the images they see in the media. She studieswhether this type of critical processing is relatedFrom left to right: Sue Hespos, Dan McAdams, Sara Broaders, and Renee Engeln-Maddoxto lower levels of body image disturbance. Shehas also been developing interventions designedto encourage women to focus on their internalqualities (e.g., personality traits, interests, academicstrengths) as means of decreasing the extent towhich they focus on appearance-related dimensions when responding to media images.This fall Dr. Engeln-Maddox moved into adorm accompanied by her husband and familydog. She joined the newly created Allison Residential Community as a faculty-in-residence. As suchshe serves as a model and mentor with regard toinformal house programming and a catalyst for theinvolvement of other faculty members in houseactivities. She offers students guidance in dealingwith the University, helps them access resources,serves as a liaison to other faculty, and acts as ageneral goodwill ambassador. She and her spousehost student gatherings in their specially designedapartment and focus on getting to know all 350Allison residents. She says she and her husband areexcited about getting a residence hall meal plansince she rarely cooks, and her dog is enjoying being spoiled by all the students.3

psychwatchThe newsletter of the department of psychology at Northwestern UniversityDistinguished Faculty Profile:Steve FranconeriIn 2011, assistant cognitive professor SteveFranconeri received the Faculty EarlyCareer Development Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), an independent federal agency created to promote theprogress of science. The foundation tracksglobal research, monitoring which areas aremost likely to result in spectacular progressand choosing the most promising scientiststo conduct the research. The Faculty EarlyCareer Development award is the NSF’s mostprestigious award for new faculty. The awardis a five year grant to teacher-scholars whodemonstrate creative career-developmentplans that effectively integrate research andeducation.Dr. Franconeri’s laboratory studies visualperception. The human visual system takesan incoming image of the world in terms ofpixels, and effortlessly turns it into objects,groups, layouts, and relations. He exploreshow this transformation occurs, and howthe visual system interacts with the mindand brain, for tasks like learning to count, orknowing left from right, or front from back.Dr. Franconeri received the award for hisproposal “Individuation in Visual Cognition,”for work in his laboratory that focuses on thestrengths and limits of visual processing, suchas how many objects people can attend to atonce. There has been a ubiquitous finding inattention research: that humans can only payattention to about four objects at a time. Thisincludes how many things we can monitor,track, count, or remember at once. It hasbeen accepted as a fundamental limit onvisual processing, yet there is little understanding of why it happens. These questionsrepresent fundamental theoretical issues, butthey are also of critical practical importance.Understanding the limit could lead to important changes in the way people organizeinformation in graphs and diagrams and mayoffer critical insight into our understandingof how children learn to count. Dr. Franconeriis also interested in why this limit occurs because knowing the reason for the limitationcan lead to figuring out how to manipulate it.He has begun to test the possibility that thelimit stems from limited space within a cognitive “map” of attended locations in the world.Work in his laboratory already suggests thatthis idea is correct – using manipulations inspired from the “map” account, he has createdsituations where the “magic number” drops to1, or increases to 8.Dr. Franconeri believes that anotherstrength of his application was the commu-4GRADUATE STUDENT PROFILE:JOHN MEIXNER, IN BRAIN, BEHAVIOR& COGNITIONnity outreach plan. He has teamed up withthe Illinois Science Council (ISC), a nonprofit organization that strives to increasepublic interest in science by staging casualevents for adults where local faculty sharetheir research in a relatable way. Over thecourse of his CAREER grant, he will help organize several “Brain Week” events, wherelocal psychology and neuroscience facultyincrease awareness and understanding oftheir research, as well as an understandingof scientific thinking in general.Dr. Franconeri has been teaching atNorthwestern since 2006 and runs Northwestern’s Visual Cognition Lab. He also hasthe pleasure of working in the same department as his wife, Dr. Joan Chiao. Whenhe is not working, he is spending time withtheir two children, or playing squash, tennis and ultimate Frisbee. He is especiallyproud of his squash skills, describing hislevel of play as “I’d be on Northwestern’svarsity squad, though as the lowest rankedplayer!”John Meixner is a fifth year graduatestudent in the JD./PhD. program, withhis Psychologyconcentration in theBrain, Behavior, andCognition program.John received hisB.S. in Biopsychologyfrom the Universityof Michigan, wherehe did undergraduateresearch in CircadianRhythms with TheresaLee. His senior honors thesis won the Pilsbury Prizefor the most outstanding undergraduate psychology research of the year. After graduating, Johnworked for advisor John Jonides at the Universityof Michigan, conducting research on Memory andExecutive Processing.John’s current research interests focus onthe intersection of science and the law. In his workwith advisor Peter Rosenfeld he has studied appliedmodern deception detection methods. Focusing onrecognition detection, which examines whether anindividual recognizes information related to a crimeor other significant event, John has first-authoredthree research papers in leading journals examiningmethods to improve recognition detection. His mostrecent paper, which employed a recognition detectionmethod of determining unknown details about terrorist activity, was featured in popular media such asTime Magazine and Wired.In addition to applied methods, John isinterested in how the legal system handles scientificevidence. In this line of research, John is interestedin questions such as, “At what point should scientificevidence become admissible?”, “How well do jurorsunderstand science presented at trial?”, and “Howcan we improve laypeople’s understanding of scientific and statistical evidence?” Working with advisorShari Diamond at the Northwestern University Schoolof Law, John studies transcripts of juror deliberations to shed light on these questions. John also currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the NorthwesternUniversity Law Review, and his article examining theadmissibility of applied deception detection will bepublished in Volume 106 of the Law Review.When not doing research, John enjoys playingthe guitar, traveling, and spending time with his wife.He’s an avid college football fan and never missed agame played by his beloved University of Michigan.After graduating, he hopes to clerk in the FederalCourt system and pursue a job as a law professor.

Distinguished Staff Profile:Florence SalesThis past year Florence Sales passed themilestone of working for Northwestern for40 years. Florence works as the graduate admissions coordinator for the PsychologyDepartment, and her standing as the longestemployed staff member makes her an important figure in the department. Her main dutyis tracking graduate student applications fromthe beginning of the application process to thetime the students are admitted. She acts as afacilitator between the faculty and prospectivestudents throughout the application processand arranges events to welcome incomingstudents to the department. She also keeps tabson the graduate students from matriculation tograduation making sure they submit the properforms for program requirements.Florence is known for going above andbeyond the tasks associated with her job. Shereaches out to help students orient to the schooland makes herself available to those who haveproblems with their classes or other issues. Thiscaring manner earned her the Employee ofthe Year Award in 2004 out of more than 4,000Northwestern employees. Her relationship withthe graduate students is so strong that it doesn’talways end after they leave Northwestern. Shedescribes her favorite part of the job as havingan opportunity to get to know the students, orher “babies,” as she refers to them. She says, “It’snice to know you’ve made a relationship thatwill continue for years and years to come.” Shestill keeps in contact with a special student wholeft Northwestern in the 1980s, and she likes totalk to faculty about where their past studentshave ended up and what they are doing now.Florence started working for Northwesternin the early 1970s. At that time, there wereonly general secretary positions, and she didFlorence when she first started the job in theearly 1970sher work on a typewriter before coming intothe computer age. Her position evolved fromsecretary to undergraduate secretary andeventually to graduate admissions coordinator. Florence is the only current member ofthe Psychology staff who was around for thedepartment’s move from Kresge Hall into SwiftHall in 1987. One prominent memory of hertime in Kresge is watching her 5 year-old sonrun around the hallways playing with facultymembers’ children. When asked how thedepartment has changed, Florence reminiscesthat the faculty and staff, “seemed like onebig family” in her early years. She is quick toadd that everyone still cares about each other,but now they seem more focused on theirindividual research and distinguishing themselves in their specialty. Florence has workedunder seven or eight department chairs in hertime here, even with many of them servingmore than one term. After 40 years and manychanges, Florence says that she still gets alongwith everybody. She is highly respected amongfaculty and staff mainly because she’s notafraid to verbalize what’s on her mind.Florence originally planned to retire in 2008;however, when the economy took a turn shedecided to remain at her position for a fewmore years. She has tentative plans to retireat the end of this year, but in this economicclimate she says is taking it “one day at a time.”Outside of work, her main focus is her husbandand church – in addition to keeping tabs on herson and grandchildren. After she retires she hasa dream of building dollhouses. She has madeone prototype previously and enjoyed cuttingher own wood and constructing everythingcompletely by hand.GRADUATE STUDENT PROFILE:MEGAN SAUTER, IN COGNITIVEMegan Sauter is happy to report that she hassurvived five years of grad school and will be earningher PhD in the fall. Her research interests have evolvedthrough the years, although each project involvedimproving the way students learn using symbolicrepresentations. This topic first sparked her interestin college, when she showed a map to a four-year-oldand the child was mystified – how could a picture beanything other thana picture!? Meganbegan her work atNorthwestern bystudying children’sspatial development,namely the relationbetween howchildren mentallyrepresent and communicate aboutspace. She foundthat when childreneither see a map or were asked to draw their own map,they were better at representing multiple locations andcommunicating these relations to others. Currently,Megan’s dissertation work involves understanding howstudents experience virtual science labs, and how thevisualizations incorporated in these labs can improve theauthenticity of the experience and learning outcomes.A few years ago, Megan’s friend dubbed her a “collector of skills” for her desire to take on many differenthobbies. Megan is an avid photographer, taking photos ofeverything from babbling babies to bluegrass musicians,from lively streetscapes to abandoned buildings. Duringher second year, she took up cycling, and has sincebiked across the state of Iowa (twice). This year, Meganfinally dusted off her father’s old guitar and began takingclasses at the Old Town School of Folk Music. She had afantastic time performing with friends at the Folk andRoots fest this summer. Five years of conference presentations made it easy to play music in front of a crowd.When Megan becomes Dr. Sauter at the end of theyear, she hopes to begin work for either an educationalresearch firm (specializing in learning technology) or fora technology company as a user experience researcher(applying her cognitive science knowledge to improve ourinteractions with technology). She also likes to tease heradviser that becoming a rock star is part of her professional plans. Given her variety of interests, a rocking androlling researcher does not seem too far removed fromthe realm of possibility. She promises to write at leastone song praising cognitive psychology, just for you all.Florence in 2011 at the celebration honoring her 40years of service at Northwestern.5

psychwatchThe newsletter of the department of psychology at Northwestern UniversityPhD Recipients 2010-2011MEGHAN BEANABIGAIL HAZLETTERICA SLOTTER(Jennifer Richeson – Adviser)“Are There “His” and “Hers” Typesof Intergroup Behavior? TheInfluence of Gender Differences inRelational and Collective Interdependence on Trust Across GroupBoundaries”(Daniel Molden – Adviser)“You Say Stop and I Say Go: TheRole of Regulatory Focus inExperiences of Public Complianceand Private Acceptance in GroupInteractions”(Wendi Gardner – Adviser)“Remind Me Who I Am: Interpersonal Strategies for Maintainingthe Self After a Threat”LAURA LUCHIESALISSA FERRY(Sue Hespos – Adviser)“The Effects of Primate Vocalizations, Backwards Speech, andFiltered Speech on Object Categorization in the First Year of Life”(Eli Finkel - Adviser)“Is High Expected Forgiveness aLicense to Transgress?”New Psychology Study Area located on the 3rd floor of Swift HallPhoto Credit: Katie Meyer6GRADUATE STUDENT PROFILE:ALLEN ROSENTHAL, IN CLINICALOriginally from the suburbs of Washington,DC, Allen Rosenthal completed his undergraduatework at the University of Utah, where he graduatedwith a major in psychology in 2006. Before he began attending graduate school, he worked in threepsychology labs and gained clinical experiencedoing psychological assessments of sex offenders.Allen’s primary research area is sexualorientation and the paraphilias (i.e., uncommon /unusual sexual interests). Although his interestswithin this field are many, he is especially interested in the relationships between sexual arousal,behavior, and orientation. His lab has recentlypublished twopapers on astudy of thesexual arousalof bisexualmen. Contraryto earliercontroversialfindings whichsuggestedthat bisexualmen are onlyaroused bymen, they found that a subpopulation of bisexualmen are aroused by both men and women (in thelab).Currently, Allen is conducting two studiesof men who are sexually attracted to partiallytransitioned male-to-female transsexuals. Thisphenomenon is referred to as gynandromorphophilia (GAM), which roughly translates towoman-man-form-lover. Very little is known aboutmen with GAM. Perhaps of greatest interest iswhether they are otherwise primarily sexuallyattracted to men or women; one could easily tellthe story either way. In another ongoing study, theyare assessing the genital arousal of some of thesemen in the lab.When Allen is not doing research or clinicalwork, he enjoys being with his partner of twelveyears and their two cats. He and his partnerenjoy good food, movies, and gardening. His ideaof heaven is making dinner with h

Printer: Elk Grove Graphics Inc. psychwatch The newsletter of the department of psychology at Northwestern University I am delighted to bring you greetings from Northwestern University’s Psychology Depart-ment. It has been a memorable year in our Department and, mostly, a fabu