Funds are requested to continue a pre-doctoral training program in the interface of behavioral and biomedical sciences, which was first funded in 2009. We request support for five trainees over a five year period. The core training faculty are from the Psychology Department and Neuroscience Program at Brandeis University. Affiliated faculty are from the Brandeis Life Sciences, and adjunct faculty are from collaborating laboratories in the Greater Boston area. The faculty of this training program are firmly committed to educating students to study human behavioral health and development from the perspective of multi-directional, dynamic interactions among the biological building blocks of the body and brain and the emergent properties of whole individuals and groups of individuals. The training program we propose will be implemented within a Psychology Ph.D. program with strong, existing, intra- and inter-disciplinary research training, course work, and extra-curricular activities between the Psychology and Neuroscience programs. Students in the training program will be required to fulfill the following requirements: 1) engage in rotations and research projects co-mentored by one or more faculty working in both psychological and biomedical disciplines; 2) take courses from menus of psychological, biomedical, and general quantitative categories; 3) attend a variety of integrative proseminars and small and large group colloquium/discussion series; 4) participate in short courses during the academic year and the summer designed to promote unity and to provide advanced training in biomedical or computational techniques. Non-trainee Ph.D. students will also be encouraged to fulfill these requirements. Full participation of Psychology students in biomedical laboratories is a challenge which is being met by systematic introduction of these curricular elements as well as by selection of qualified candidates. Adherence to and evaluation of the training program will be ensured by 1) annual internal reviews by the full core faculty of students' fulfillment of their gols as set out in a contract co-developed with the mentors; 2) annual reviews of the core faculty's guardianship by an internal steering committee and an external review committee; 3) feedback from students currently in the program and students who have graduated. Our general approach to recruitment of students will be through direct outreach and networking. To recruit and retain minority students, we will build upon the successful methods of our colleagues who are directing successful training grants in Psychology and Life Sciences at Brandeis
The powerful relationship between human mental and physical health is evident in the fact that the three leading causes of early death are smoking, poor diet, and physical inactivity Training a new generation of scholars who have command of psychological, behavioral, and biomedical conceptual and methodological tools will help promote health and prevent and treat psychological and physical disorders. The Brandies University Psychology PhD program will leverage its implicit ties to Neuroscience and other biomedical disciplines to give its pre-doctoral students this augmented inter-disciplinary training
| Talbot, Christine E; Ksander, John C; Gutchess, Angela (2018) Aging Impairs Disengagement From Negative Words in a Dot Probe Task. Front Psychol 9:2361 |
| Ksander, John C; Paige, Laura E; Johndro, Hunter A et al. (2018) Cultural specialization of visual cortex. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 13:709-718 |
| Fiksdal, Alexander; Hanlin, Luke; Kuras, Yuliya et al. (2018) Associations between symptoms of depression and anxiety and cortisol responses to and recovery from acute stress. Psychoneuroendocrinology 102:44-52 |
| Hager, Brandon M; Yang, Albert C; Gutsell, Jennifer N (2018) Measuring Brain Complexity During Neural Motor Resonance. Front Neurosci 12:758 |
| Ayasse, Nicole D; Wingfield, Arthur (2018) A Tipping Point in Listening Effort: Effects of Linguistic Complexity and Age-Related Hearing Loss on Sentence Comprehension. Trends Hear 22:2331216518790907 |
| Kuras, Yuliya I; McInnis, Christine M; Thoma, Myriam V et al. (2017) Increased alpha-amylase response to an acute psychosocial stress challenge in healthy adults with childhood adversity. Dev Psychobiol 59:91-98 |
| Paige, Laura E; Ksander, John C; Johndro, Hunter A et al. (2017) Cross-cultural differences in the neural correlates of specific and general recognition. Cortex 91:250-261 |
| Geiger, Ashley M; Kirschbaum, Clemens; Wolf, Jutta M (2017) Comparison group matters for chronic stress effects of subjective social status. J Health Psychol :1359105317709511 |
| Goodman, William K; Geiger, Ashley M; Wolf, Jutta M (2017) Leisure activities are linked to mental health benefits by providing time structure: comparing employed, unemployed and homemakers. J Epidemiol Community Health 71:4-11 |
| Chen, Xuejie; Gianferante, Danielle; Hanlin, Luke et al. (2017) HPA-axis and inflammatory reactivity to acute stress is related with basal HPA-axis activity. Psychoneuroendocrinology 78:168-176 |
Showing the most recent 10 out of 43 publications
