Category: Department Updates
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Rogoff serves on Committee on Early Relational Health, publishes on Guatemalan Mayan mother/child collaboration
UCSC Foundation Distinguished Professor Barbara Rogoff was selected to serve on the Committee on Early Relational Health of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. She published a handbook chapter and an article on changes across generations in Guatemalan Mayan mothers’ collaboration with young children, related to globalization, and their reflections on changes in…
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Fox Tree publishes article on how authority affects social evaluations of negotiation words
Professor Jean E. Fox Tree published “How authority affects social evaluations of negotiation words” in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. This study utilized a mock-Discord approach to investigate the impact of word choice on ascribed personality and its variation by expertise. For example, words like “clearly” and “obviously” made peers, TAs, and faculty appear less…
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Ph.D. candidate Matt Evans wins 2025 Best Article Award from the Psychonomic Society
Professor Nicolas Davidenko’s Cognitive Psychology Ph.D. candidate Matt Evans recently won the 2025 Best Article Award from the Psychonomic Society for his research paper titled “Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery.” Evans worked with Psychology Professor Nicolas Davidenko and undergraduate research assistant Pablo Gaeta to study “earworms,” the types of songs that get stuck in…
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Azmitia contributes to APA report on promotion, tenure, and retention of Faculty of Color in psychology
Professor Margarita Azmitia contributed to the report of the APA’s Board of Scientific Affairs Task Force on Promotion, Tenure, and Retention of Faculty of Color in Psychology. Despite an increasingly diverse population, the representation of faculty of color in tenure-track and senior faculty positions remains disproportionately low. This report provides actionable recommendations for institutions to…
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Rogoff wins two lifetime awards and publishes article on her theoretical approach
Distinguished Professor Barbara Rogoff received two Lifetime Achievement Awards this spring: The Lifetime Contribution to Cultural Historical Research Award from the American Educational Research Association‘s (AERA) Cultural Historical Research Special Interest Group, and the Raymond Buriel Distinguished Leadership Award from the Society for Research in Child Development‘s (SRCD) Latinx Caucus. Rogoff is an internationally acclaimed…
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Leaper co-authors article on family socialization and gender roles
With colleagues May Ling Halim and Brenda Gutierrez, Distinguished Professor Campbell Leaper conducted a study published in Sex Roles entitled, “Socialization of Gender Public Regard: Family Conversations, Practices and Routine.” An ethnically diverse sample of young adults were asked to write retrospective essays reflecting on their family socialization experiences. An inductive analysis of these narratives…
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Fox Tree co-authors articles on small talk, conversation quality, and pragmatics
Distinguished Professor Jean E. Fox Tree co-authored “Small talk in videoconferencing improves conversational experience and fosters relationships” with UCSC psychology alumni Andrew Guydish in Cognition and Emotion. The article explores how, while many people dislike videoconferencing, one thing that can make it better is allowing time for small talk. Participants in the researchers’ study engaged…
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Rogoff included in developmental psychology compendium, invited as guest speaker in Guatemala
In winter 2025, UCSC Foundation Distinguished Professor Barbara Rogoff was included in a compendium of leading figures in developmental psychology and asked to describe her career path and contributions. Last October, Rogoff was a guest speaker at the Universidad Rafael Landivar and at the Scientific Conference on Human Development in Antigua, Guatemala.
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Ph.D. candidate Elise Duffau co-authors article on voice assistant politeness
In winter 2025, Ph.D. candidate Elise Duffau co-authored the article “Expecting politeness: Perceptions of voice assistant politeness” in Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. For fifty years, politeness researchers claimed that some politeness forms show camaraderie (“Let’s go get lunch”) and some show distance (“If it’s not too much trouble, want to get lunch together?”). Researchers assessed how people…
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Hammack awarded grant from American Psychological Association to publish book on gender, sexuality, and relationships
In winter 2025, Professor Phil Hammack was awarded a small grant from Division 1 of the American Psychological Association (the Society for General Psychology) to support the completion of his forthcoming book, “Radical Authenticity: The Twenty-First Century Revolution in Gender, Sexuality, and Relationships” (contracted with Oxford University Press’ trade division). The book blends a review of…
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Ambivalent sexism linked to Mexican-heritage ethnic identity and gender messages from older relatives, familial peers, and nonfamilial peers
In winter 2025, Distinguished Professor Campbell Leaper co-published an article in the Journal of Latinx Psychology with former doctoral student Dr. Brenda Gutierrez, which examined the socialization of sexist attitudes among Mexican-heritage college youths. Endorsing sexism was less likely if both their cultural identity was important and their familial peers (e.g., cousins, siblings) had conveyed gender-egalitarian messages. Thus, same-aged relatives…
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Double dissociation of spontaneous alpha-band activity and pupil-linked arousal on additive and multiplicative perceptual gain
Assistant Professor Jason Samaha worked in collaboration with Ph.D. student April Pilipenko to publish this 2024 article in the Journal of Neuroscience, finding that synchronous brain waves in the alpha-band inhibit visual perception, regardless of the strength or presence of a stimulus, leading to false percepts. Simultaneously, changes in one’s pupil size boost perception for…