Psychology Research Areas
Dr. Rantanen conducts research in examining human factors in complex systems, human performance measurement and modeling, mental workload, decision-making, and human error and reliability; in particular, the effects of time pressure and temporal uncertainty on workload and performance; development of cognitive models of human operators’ temporal awareness that will allow for prediction of their performance under various operational demands, and development of information displays and other augmented reality applications to support effective, error-free, and timely decision-making under conditions of uncertainty and time stress; development of methods and standards for human-centered design of successful products and systems.
Dr. Baschnagel is a clinical psychologist by training. His research focuses on studying the attentional and emotional aspects of addiction, particularly cue-reactivity (i.e. how one reacts to drug-related stimuli) and emotion regulation in smoking and alcohol use disorders, the role of individual differences in addiction, and developing a mobile app for heart rate variability biofeedback. He frequently uses psychophysiological research methods to study attention and emotional processing; measures such as the startle eye-blink reflex, facial EMG, heart rate variability, and skin conductance responses. He also has expertise on the topic of Anxiety Disorders and Borderline Personality Disorder with a focus on substance use among individuals with these conditions. https://www.rit.edu/harc/
Dr. Godleski focuses her research on developmental pathways to risk and resilience in predicting social competence across the lifespan, especially understanding the influence of early development from pregnancy to early childhood. In particular, she is interested in how parent and family influences, such as parent substance use and parent-child or inter-parental interactions, impact the development of dysregulation and reactivity in childhood. Specifically, she has focused on protective (e.g., parenting) and maladaptive (e.g., prenatal exposure) processes that predict and maintain negative social-emotional developmental and health outcomes. Her research incorporates both investigation of developmental processes as well as intervention and prevention work. She is a licensed clinical psychologist in New York State and interweaves her research and practice.
Dr. Houston focuses her research broadly on the psychophysiological and neuropsychological underpinnings of impulsivity and aggression, particularly in the context of substance abuse risk and treatment. Primary techniques used in Dr. Houston’s lab include event-related brain potentials (ERPs; derived from the EEG), heart rate variability, biobehavioral assessment (e.g., executive function, attention), structured clinical interviews, and self-report measures of behavior/mood/personality. Some of Dr. Houston’s current projects include associations between impulsivity, neurocognitive functioning, and binge drinking/marijuana use as well as the application of heart rate variability biofeedback to reduce alcohol/drug urges and improve health outcomes. Dr. Houston has also had students develop projects related to concussion history and substance use, impulsivity and trauma, attentional bias and cognitive control in cannabis users, and neurocognitive correlates of behavioral addictions such as internet gaming or pornography use.
Dr. Haraden has areas of expertise that fall within the intersection of clinical, quantitative, and developmental psychology. His research focuses on examining the risk factors for internalizing disorders in youth, specifically investigating the role of chronotype/circadian rhythms and pubertal development in conferring risk for depression. In addition, he seeks to further understand the role that type of measurement plays in how individuals respond to questions about mental health and if those differences are meaningful. He also has an interest in using various statistical methods with R/RStudio and being able to examine the methodology of the way we conduct our research as a field with a focus on Open Science practices.
Dr. Schenkel is a clinical psychologist by training. Her research is in the area of developmental psychopathology and serious mental illness (i.e., bipolar disorder and schizophrenia spectrum disorders). Her work focuses on the relationships between early childhood traumatic experiences and later clinical outcomes. She also studies the role of social cognition in the clinical expression of serious mental illness, including investigations of emotion perception and social functioning. Dr. Schenkel is currently working in the area of preventative interventions for children and young adults with trauma histories who are at risk for psychiatric disorders and co-occurring substance misuse. To this end, Dr. Schenkel’s research attempts to integrate clinical, developmental, and social-cognitive risk factors in the study and treatment of serious mental illness.
Dr. Houston focuses her research broadly on the psychophysiological and neuropsychological underpinnings of impulsivity and aggression, particularly in the context of substance abuse risk and treatment. Primary techniques used in Dr. Houston’s lab include event-related brain potentials (ERPs; derived from the EEG), heart rate variability, biobehavioral assessment (e.g., executive function, attention), structured clinical interviews, and self-report measures of behavior/mood/personality. Some of Dr. Houston’s current projects include associations between impulsivity, neurocognitive functioning, and binge drinking/marijuana use as well as the application of heart rate variability biofeedback to reduce alcohol/drug urges and improve health outcomes. Dr. Houston has also had students develop projects related to concussion history and substance use, impulsivity and trauma, attentional bias and cognitive control in cannabis users, and neurocognitive correlates of behavioral addictions such as internet gaming or pornography use.
Dr. Alm is the joint program director of the MS in AI in the School of Information, the director of the AWARE-AI NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program at RIT, and also director of CLaSP, the Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing Lab. She is Professor in the Department of Psychology and affiliated with the Department of Computer Science, the Ph.D. Program in Computing and Information Sciences, and the MS in Data Science. She is also Associate Director of the Center for Human-aware AI at RIT. Her research interests are in AI and machine learning for affective computing with linguistic or multimodal sensing, multimodal dialogue processing, or humans in NLP and AI systems including for interactive machine learning. Cissi has taught natural language processing, speech processing, artificial intelligence, and linguistics courses.
Dr. Condry is a developmental psychologist who studies cognitive change in children and adults. Her current research is focused on learning among college students and how mindset and course structure influence student success. Additional areas of interest include visual perception, illusions and media influences.
Dr. DeLong is the Lab Director for the Comparative Cognition & Perception Lab (CCP Lab). The CCP Lab conducts research in animal cognition and perception. We conduct our research in a number of facilities. Our lab at RIT is located in the Eastman building and houses fish tanks (we currently have goldfish). We also work with the Seneca Park Zoo in Rochester NY to study a variety of species (e.g., Bornean orangutans, North American river otters, African black-footed penguins). In addition, we collaborate with research partners in Florida, California, and Hawaii to study bottlenose dolphins. We test human subjects in comparative studies designed to gain insight into cues and strategies used by animals in cognitive tasks and to discover similarities in cognitive and perception between humans and non-human animals. We study a variety of topics including visual and auditory object perception, biosonar, tool use, and number perception. Please see http://www.rit.edu/delonglab/
Dr. Dye focuses his research program on the question whether being born deaf means that you see better. His lab conducts EEG and behavioral research on brain reorganization in the face of altered sensory input, asking what happens to the brain areas and neural pathways associated with visual and multi-sensory processing when auditory input is missing. Most of his research looks at selective visual attention in deaf individuals, asking whether their greater reliance upon visual information in their environment means that their perceptual and cognitive systems are better able to select and process visual information. His lab’s website is at http://www.deafxlab.com/.
Dr. Fitch focuses her research program on the interaction between language acquisition and attention in the PAW (Perception & Acquisition of Words) Lab. Her recent research asks about the role of attentional and linguistic cues in word learning across different contexts, and uses eye-tracking, behavioral experiments, and observational measures. The lab primarily addresses these questions in deaf and hearing infants and toddlers, with and without autism spectrum disorder.
Dr. Sutton currently serves as the graduate director for the M.S. Experimental Psychology Program and is the Lab Director for the Attention, Emotion, and Cognition Lab. Her research program focuses on the interplay of emotion and cognition. Dr. Sutton has examined how emotion words capture and hold attention, as well as how emotion words are represented within and across languages. Recently, she has also investigated the processing of emotional images and faces. In the past year, undergraduates in the lab have also examined the science of learning. Projects focusing on the science of learning have examined the relationship between note-taking strategies and exam performance, and how assignment feedback impacts one’s emotional and cognitive perception to the feedback.
Dr. Rissman is the director of the Meaning, Language, and Cognition Lab. She investigates how cross-linguistic diversity reflects cultural and cognitive diversity, and how, by contrast, people conceptualize and communicate about the world in similar ways despite their linguistic differences. Her research is broadly interdisciplinary and collaborative, integrating cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, theoretical semantics, child development, and language evolution.
Dr. DeLong is the Lab Director for the Comparative Cognition & Perception Lab (CCP Lab). The CCP Lab conducts research in animal cognition and perception. We conduct our research in a number of facilities. Our lab at RIT is located in the Eastman building and houses fish tanks (we currently have goldfish). We also work with the Seneca Park Zoo in Rochester NY to study a variety of species (e.g., Bornean orangutans, North American river otters, African black-footed penguins). In addition, we collaborate with research partners in Florida, California, and Hawaii to study bottlenose dolphins. We test human subjects in comparative studies designed to gain insight into cues and strategies used by animals in cognitive tasks and to discover similarities in cognitive and perception between humans and non-human animals. We study a variety of topics including visual and auditory object perception, biosonar, tool use, and number perception. Please see http://www.rit.edu/delonglab/
Dr. Smerbeck is a licensed psychologist in New York State conducting research on a range of applied topics. His main areas of research interest include autism spectrum disorder, gender and sexuality, and psychometrics – the study of psychological measurement. Some of his recent projects have included investigating the ways in which restricted interests help and hinder the functioning of children with autism spectrum disorder, creating international norms for neuropsychological tests, and examining the variables which influence college students’ sexual health behaviors. Dr. Smerbeck has also developed materials to promote the integration of transgender students into higher education settings and is conducting research to assess its efficacy.
Dr. Bosworth is a developmental psychologist, studying perception and language processing in deaf and hearing children using eye-tracking at the newly-founded Perception, Language and Attention in Youth (PLAY) Lab. The lab’s focus is to better understand how deafness and sign language experience impact cognitive and perceptual abilities. The lab is currently investigating gaze behavior in infants, children, and adults to address questions about how we learn and process American Sign Language (ASL). The lab is also studying how deaf children explore objects through touch for play.
Dr. Comer is a lecturer in the Department. Her expertise is in developmental psychology, specifically adolescent development, autonomy development, and parent-child relationships. Dr. Comer teaches classes in both the undergraduate and graduate Programs, including Introduction to Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Abnormal Psychology, Learning and Behavior, Psychotherapy, Social and Emotional Development, and Graduate Developmental Psychology. Dr. Comer also serves as a reader on committees for students enrolled in the MS Experimental Psychology Program.
Dr. Condry is a developmental psychologist who studies cognitive change in children and adults. Her current research is focused on learning among college students and how mindset and course structure influence student success. Additional areas of interest include visual perception, illusions and media influences.
Dr. Fitch focuses her research program on the interaction between language acquisition and attention in the PAW (Perception & Acquisition of Words) Lab. Her recent research asks about the role of attentional and linguistic cues in word learning across different contexts, and uses eye-tracking, behavioral experiments, and observational measures. The lab primarily addresses these questions in deaf and hearing infants and toddlers, with and without autism spectrum disorder.
Dr. Godleski focuses her research on developmental pathways to risk and resilience in predicting social competence across the lifespan, especially understanding the influence of early development from pregnancy to early childhood. In particular, she is interested in how parent and family influences, such as parent substance use and parent-child or inter-parental interactions, impact the development of dysregulation and reactivity in childhood. Specifically, she has focused on protective (e.g., parenting) and maladaptive (e.g., prenatal exposure) processes that predict and maintain negative social-emotional developmental and health outcomes. Her research incorporates both investigation of developmental processes as well as intervention and prevention work. She is a licensed clinical psychologist in New York State and interweaves her research and practice.
Dr. Godleski focuses her research on developmental pathways to risk and resilience in predicting social competence across the lifespan, especially understanding the influence of early development from pregnancy to early childhood. In particular, she is interested in how parent and family influences, such as parent substance use and parent-child or inter-parental interactions, impact the development of dysregulation and reactivity in childhood. Specifically, she has focused on protective (e.g., parenting) and maladaptive (e.g., prenatal exposure) processes that predict and maintain negative social-emotional developmental and health outcomes. Her research incorporates both investigation of developmental processes as well as intervention and prevention work. She is a licensed clinical psychologist in New York State and interweaves her research and practice.
Dr. Schenkel is a clinical psychologist by training. Her research is in the area of developmental psychopathology and serious mental illness (i.e., bipolar disorder and schizophrenia spectrum disorders). Her work focuses on the relationships between early childhood traumatic experiences and later clinical outcomes. She also studies the role of social cognition in the clinical expression of serious mental illness, including investigations of emotion perception and social functioning. Dr. Schenkel is currently working in the area of preventative interventions for children and young adults with trauma histories who are at risk for psychiatric disorders and co-occurring substance misuse. To this end, Dr. Schenkel’s research attempts to integrate clinical, developmental, and social-cognitive risk factors in the study and treatment of serious mental illness.
Dr. Baschnagel is a clinical psychologist by training. His research focuses on studying the attentional and emotional aspects of addiction, particularly cue-reactivity (i.e. how one reacts to drug-related stimuli) and emotion regulation in smoking and alcohol use disorders, the role of individual differences in addiction, and developing a mobile app for heart rate variability biofeedback. He frequently uses psychophysiological research methods to study attention and emotional processing; measures such as the startle eye-blink reflex, facial EMG, heart rate variability, and skin conductance responses. He also has expertise on the topic of Anxiety Disorders and Borderline Personality Disorder with a focus on substance use among individuals with these conditions. https://www.rit.edu/harc/
Dr. Houston focuses her research broadly on the psychophysiological and neuropsychological underpinnings of impulsivity and aggression, particularly in the context of substance abuse risk and treatment. Primary techniques used in Dr. Houston’s lab include event-related brain potentials (ERPs; derived from the EEG), heart rate variability, biobehavioral assessment (e.g., executive function, attention), structured clinical interviews, and self-report measures of behavior/mood/personality. Some of Dr. Houston’s current projects include associations between impulsivity, neurocognitive functioning, and binge drinking/marijuana use as well as the application of heart rate variability biofeedback to reduce alcohol/drug urges and improve health outcomes. Dr. Houston has also had students develop projects related to concussion history and substance use, impulsivity and trauma, attentional bias and cognitive control in cannabis users, and neurocognitive correlates of behavioral addictions such as internet gaming or pornography use.
Dr. Prokosch is an experimental Social Psychologist who examines how aspects of environments (e.g., social, physical, structural, or built factors) impact people’s perceptions, attitudes, and decision-making. She is also interested in the intersections between people’s individual differences and environment that shape people's social cognition. She is PI of the Social Cognition Across People and Environments (SCAPE) Lab an interdisciplinary friendly Social Psychology lab that studies topics relevant to health, politics, climate change, and disaster mitigation. Dr. Prokosch routinely advises undergraduate and graduate research and has served on graduate thesis committees. Lab website >
Dr. Alm is the joint program director of the MS in AI in the School of Information, the director of the AWARE-AI NSF Research Traineeship (NRT) Program at RIT, and also director of CLaSP, the Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing Lab. She is Professor in the Department of Psychology and affiliated with the Department of Computer Science, the Ph.D. Program in Computing and Information Sciences, and the MS in Data Science. She is also Associate Director of the Center for Human-aware AI at RIT. Her research interests are in AI and machine learning for affective computing with linguistic or multimodal sensing, multimodal dialogue processing, or humans in NLP and AI systems including for interactive machine learning. Cissi has taught natural language processing, speech processing, artificial intelligence, and linguistics courses.
Dr. Dye focuses his research program on the question whether being born deaf means that you see better. His lab conducts EEG and behavioral research on brain reorganization in the face of altered sensory input, asking what happens to the brain areas and neural pathways associated with visual and multi-sensory processing when auditory input is missing. Most of his research looks at selective visual attention in deaf individuals, asking whether their greater reliance upon visual information in their environment means that their perceptual and cognitive systems are better able to select and process visual information. His lab’s website is at http://www.deafxlab.com/.
Dr. Fitch focuses her research program on the interaction between language acquisition and attention in the PAW (Perception & Acquisition of Words) Lab. Her recent research asks about the role of attentional and linguistic cues in word learning across different contexts, and uses eye-tracking, behavioral experiments, and observational measures. The lab primarily addresses these questions in deaf and hearing infants and toddlers, with and without autism spectrum disorder.
Dr. Rissman is the director of the Meaning, Language, and Cognition Lab. She investigates how cross-linguistic diversity reflects cultural and cognitive diversity, and how, by contrast, people conceptualize and communicate about the world in similar ways despite their linguistic differences. Her research is broadly interdisciplinary and collaborative, integrating cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, theoretical semantics, child development, and language evolution.
Dr. Houston focuses her research broadly on the psychophysiological and neuropsychological underpinnings of impulsivity and aggression, particularly in the context of substance abuse risk and treatment. Primary techniques used in Dr. Houston’s lab include event-related brain potentials (ERPs; derived from the EEG), heart rate variability, biobehavioral assessment (e.g., executive function, attention), structured clinical interviews, and self-report measures of behavior/mood/personality. Some of Dr. Houston’s current projects include associations between impulsivity, neurocognitive functioning, and binge drinking/marijuana use as well as the application of heart rate variability biofeedback to reduce alcohol/drug urges and improve health outcomes. Dr. Houston has also had students develop projects related to concussion history and substance use, impulsivity and trauma, attentional bias and cognitive control in cannabis users, and neurocognitive correlates of behavioral addictions such as internet gaming or pornography use.
Dr. Smerbeck is a licensed psychologist in New York State conducting research on a range of applied topics. His main areas of research interest include autism spectrum disorder, gender and sexuality, and psychometrics – the study of psychological measurement. Some of his recent projects have included investigating the ways in which restricted interests help and hinder the functioning of children with autism spectrum disorder, creating international norms for neuropsychological tests, and examining the variables which influence college students’ sexual health behaviors. Dr. Smerbeck has also developed materials to promote the integration of transgender students into higher education settings and is conducting research to assess its efficacy.
Dr. DeLong is the Lab Director for the Comparative Cognition & Perception Lab (CCP Lab). The CCP Lab conducts research in animal cognition and perception. We conduct our research in a number of facilities. Our lab at RIT is located in the Eastman building and houses fish tanks (we currently have goldfish). We also work with the Seneca Park Zoo in Rochester NY to study a variety of species (e.g., Bornean orangutans, North American river otters, African black-footed penguins). In addition, we collaborate with research partners in Florida, California, and Hawaii to study bottlenose dolphins. We test human subjects in comparative studies designed to gain insight into cues and strategies used by animals in cognitive tasks and to discover similarities in cognitive and perception between humans and non-human animals. We study a variety of topics including visual and auditory object perception, biosonar, tool use, and number perception. Please see http://www.rit.edu/delonglab/
Dr. Herbert studies various topics in perception (focusing on vision but with interests in cross-modal processing) and visual attention. He has studied symmetry perception, perceptual organization, depth and motion illusions, face perception and other topics. His current research examines emotional face perception (with Dr. Sutton in Psychology), attention and augmented reality systems, and cortical loci in symmetry perception. If you are interested in research in perception, please contact Dr. Herbert.
Dr. Smerbeck is a licensed psychologist in New York State conducting research on a range of applied topics. His main areas of research interest include autism spectrum disorder, gender and sexuality, and psychometrics – the study of psychological measurement. Some of his recent projects have included investigating the ways in which restricted interests help and hinder the functioning of children with autism spectrum disorder, creating international norms for neuropsychological tests, and examining the variables which influence college students’ sexual health behaviors. Dr. Smerbeck has also developed materials to promote the integration of transgender students into higher education settings and is conducting research to assess its efficacy.
Dr. Chand-Matzke is a lecturer in the Department. Her expertise is in social psychology, specifically gender and body image. She also has research interests in the scholarship of teaching and learning. Dr. Chand-Matzke teaches a variety of courses in our undergraduate Program, including Introduction to Psychology, Social Psychology, Personality, the Psychology of Women, and our Research Methods classes. Dr. Chand-Matzke also serves as a reader on committees for students enrolled in the MS Experimental Psychology Program.
Dr. Edlund is Lab Director for the Social, Evolutionary, and Forensic Psychology Laboratory. His research explores meta-science questions (looking at the teaching of science, “good” subject effects, participant crosstalk, and informed consent). His research also explores romantic attraction, mate value, stereotypes and prejudice, and the intersection of social psychology and the legal system. Dr. Edlund regularly collaborates with graduate and undergraduate students in his research.
Dr. Prokosch is an experimental Social Psychologist who examines how aspects of environments (e.g., social, physical, structural, or built factors) impact people’s perceptions, attitudes, and decision-making. She is also interested in the intersections between people’s individual differences and environment that shape people's social cognition. She is PI of the Social Cognition Across People and Environments (SCAPE) Lab an interdisciplinary friendly Social Psychology lab that studies topics relevant to health, politics, climate change, and disaster mitigation. Dr. Prokosch routinely advises undergraduate and graduate research and has served on graduate thesis committees. Lab website >