Wide-Ranging Psychology Research Promises Direct Applications

The Department of Psychology has long been a standard-bearer for research that advances knowledge while contributing tangible social benefits.

The department’s multiyear extramural grant funding now totals about $17.5 million from such sources as the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Child Health and Development and the National Institute of Justice. During fiscal year 2010, the department spent $4.1 million in total grant dollars.  

These grants fund projects that span the life cycle and psychological landscape, increasingly looking to the nexus between nature and nurture for insight.

Associate Professor Ben Hankin, for example, is working on a longitudinal study to help determine the genetic and environmental triggers for anxiety and depression in children and adolescents. In fall 2009, he received the prestigious American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology.

Learning disorders specialist Bruce Pennington is examining the genetic and symptomatic relationship between delayed speech in children and dyslexia, which are typically studied by different disciplines. If a link emerges, it could change how these phenomena are defined, diagnosed and treated.

Sarah Watamura, meanwhile, is interested in stress and its effects on health and cognitive development. The director of the Child Health and Development Lab, Watamura is measuring the stress hormone cortisol in preschoolers—including children newly arrived from Mexico—at home and when they are attending full- and half-day Head Start and community child care programs. The goal: a better understanding of those stressors and how to mitigate them.

Stress also is implicated in the work of Anne DePrince, who has shown that violence against women and children can have a deleterious effect on attention and memory. She is working with Stephen Shirk—who has developed methods to treat adolescent depression—to use and study those methods in the treatment of young people who have experienced trauma.

Economic stress is at the heart of many marital disagreements. Martha Wadsworth, who directs the Colorado Project on Economic Strain, and marriage expert Howard Markman are studying whether teaching low-income couples relationship skills (developed through Markman’s Center on Marital and Family Studies) might help them cope with financial stress and improve their marriages and families.

“Many of us are trying to develop new treatments for adults, teenagers with depression or to prevent disorders in kids,” Wadsworth said. “We are doing applied research with an eye toward developing direct applications quickly.