Dear Colleague:
Please forward this message to students seeking admission to a doctoral training program in psychology.
The Ph.D. Program in Life-Span Developmental Psychology at
APPLICATIONS. Applications are due December 15. Application forms are available online at http://psychology.wvu.edu/ by following links under the “future students” tab.
PROGRAM. WVU’s Psychology Department received the “Innovation in Graduate Education Award” from the American Psychological Association http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr06/integration.html. The award recognizes the junior-colleague model used to train graduate students in research, teaching, and service. We view graduate training as modeling and instruction in a variety of professional skills and roles, only some of which are acquired in the classroom. As junior colleagues, students and faculty collaborate in research, rather than students serving as research assistants assigned to individual faculty members. Students develop individualized plans of study. Contact among faculty and students outside the classroom is frequent and casual. WVU has an illustrious history in life-span development as one of the first programs in this field. Our program continues to provide in-depth training to the next generation of life-span developmental psychologists. Graduates are highly successful in obtaining employment and find positions in academia, government, research institutions, foundations, and applied settings.
RESEARCH TRAINING. Initially, faculty members provide a high degree of structure and guidance that is tailored to the students’ entry-level research design and data analysis skills. By the end of training, students have developed a research specialty and can successfully design and execute all stages of a research project (e.g., data collection, analysis, dissemination of findings). Students attend professional conferences and present their research to regional, national, and international audiences. Students also regularly publish their work in scholarly journals and books. The department and college provide funds to support student research and travel to conferences.
TEACHING TRAINING. Graduate students receive structured, supervised, hands-on teaching experience. All students become proficient in a variety of teaching technologies and methods. For those students whose career plans emphasize college teaching, a college teaching specialization is available.
FUNDING. All students can expect to receive 4 years of financial support via research or teaching assistantships (3 years if entering with a Master’s degree), plus a tuition waiver and basic health insurance.
THE
A COMMITMENT TO STUDYING THE LIFESPAN.
WVU & MORGANTOWN. WVU has an enrollment of over 26,000 students and is a
MORE INFORMATION. For more information about the PhD program in life-span developmental psychology at WVU, contact JoNell Strough, Coordinator of the Life-Span doctoral program at: JoNell.Strough@mail.wvu.edu.
FACULTY RESEARCH INTERESTS AND CONTACT INFORMATION
Katherine Karraker, Ph.D. (Email: Katherine.Karraker@mail.wvu.edu)
Dr. Karraker’s primary research interest is infant social relations. She and her students study such topics as the effects of infant characteristics (like physical attractiveness, gender, prematurity, and temperament) on adults, parent-infant relationships, infant assessment, parenting self-efficacy, stress and coping in infancy, and infant and mother sleep. Current research projects address the development of shy temperament in infancy and early childhood, sleep in premature infants and their mothers, and the effect of infants’ names on adults’ perceptions.
Amy Gentzler, Ph.D. (Email: Amy.Gentzler@mail.wvu.edu)
In an ongoing project, Dr. Gentzler and her team are investigating children’s emotional responses to negative and positive events and how memories for these events change over time. Other projects are mainly in the data analysis or writing stage. For example, she is studying how physiological risk (in terms of heart rate or vagal tone) and maternal responses to children’s negative emotions relates to children’s development of coping strategies (e.g., rumination) and depressive symptoms. With college student samples, Dr. Gentzler and her students are examining similar questions such as how adults vary in response to positive events. Also of interest is how adolescents' use of communication technologies with peers and parents is related to relationship quality and adjustment.
Aaron Metzger, Ph.D. (Email:. Aaron.Metzger@mail.wvu.edu)
Dr. Metzger’s areas of research interests include adolescent social-cognitive development in familial and community contexts. Specifically, Dr. Metzger’s research explores social-cognitive aspects of civic development, including adolescents’ civic and political reasoning, conceptualizations of citizenship, and beliefs about civic behavior, community membership, and political institutions. In addition, Dr. Metzger examines the developmental impact of adolescents’ civic engagement, such as community service or political activity, as well as the developmental benefits of organized activity involvement. In his research on family processes, Dr. Metzger examines adolescent-parent communication about age-normed problem behavior such as cigarette or alcohol use. This research examines both parental messages to their adolescents and parental knowledge of their adolescents’ behavior including adolescents’ strategies for managing information shared with parents.
Julie Hicks Patrick, Ph.D. (Email: Julie.Patrick@mail.wvu.edu)
Dr. Patrick’s research focuses broadly on healthy aging among middle-aged and older adults. As such, research in her lab examines cognitive, psychological and physical well-being. Research projects include examinations of grandparents raising grandchildren, cognitive interventions at mid-life, and health behaviors, including eating disorders. Her work has been published in Psychology and Aging, Journal of Gerontology, and Quality of Life Research. As P.I., Dr. Patrick has held grants from the National Institute on Aging, National Cancer Institute, and the American Psychological Association.
JoNell Strough, Ph.D. (Email: JoNell.Strough@mail.wvu.edu)
One of Dr. Strough’s current research project builds on her prior research (Strough, Mehta, McFall & Schuller, 2008, Psychological Science) to understand why older adults (60+ years) make decisions that are more logical than those made by young adult college students. Another set of projects, funded by the National Institute on Aging (PEPS, the Pairs Everyday Problem Solving Study), examine interpersonal processes that contribute to effective collaborations among friends, with the aim of understanding why older adults are better than younger adults at working with friends to solve everyday problems (see Strough, McFall, Flinn, & Schuller, 2008, Psychology and Aging). In her research on gender development, Dr. Strough and her students are investigating: (a) causes and consequences of sex segregation across the life span (see Mehta & Strough, 2009, Developmental Review), and (b) how gender-typed behaviors vary according to the social context of interactions with friends versus romantic partners.
