Academic Programs
Department of Psychology
Studying psychology at Denison
Associate Professor Nestor Matthews and one of his psychology students review the computer analysis of data from an experiment in a Denison sensory perception laboratory
THE COURSES YOU WILL TAKE IN DENISON'S Department of Psychology will examine contemporary theories, research and special topics in the field; provide applications of psychology to personal concerns and social issues; and develop your understanding and skills of scientific inquiry. The coursework and faculty will facilitate your discovery of connections between psychology and other disciplines as they help you achieve a personally meaningful psychological perspective.
The Department of Psychology offers excellent laboratory and research facilities and state-of-the-art computer hardware and software to support your course-related learning and to provide independent research opportunities for students and faculty alike.
In addition, there are opportunities for gaining practical experience relevant to psychology in applied settings such as schools, social service agencies, health care facilities, mental health centers and other community-based programs.
Your close association with a faculty adviser provides the basis for developing a course of study and experiences within psychology that best suits your interests and goals for the future.
The psychology major and minor
As a psychology major at Denison, you can earn either a bachelor of arts (B.A.) or bachelor of science (B.S.) degree. For the B.A., you must take a minimum of 38 credits in psychology.
Required courses include Introduction to Psychology, Research Methods in Psychology, two upper-level research courses, History and Systems, and one topical seminar. For the B.S., you must complete Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences, an additional research course in psychology, and other natural science courses.
For a minor, you must complete 27 semester hours of course credit in psychology.
What do psychology majors do after Denison?
The flexibility in the requirements for a major in psychology permits you to select a course of study that is consistent with your educational, professional, and career goals. A large number of Denison psychology majors have pursued graduate training. Two recent studies, in fact, have ranked Denison in the top 20 (from among nearly 900 private undergraduate institutions) in the number of students who earned doctoral degrees in psychology.
Others continue their education in programs such as physical/occupational therapy, social work, special education, city and regional planning, law, recreation, allied health, and labor and industrial relations. There are also increasing numbers of students at the bachelor's degree level finding interesting and stimulating careers in social services, human resources, business, teaching and research.
From recent graduating classes, students are pursuing masters and doctoral psychology degrees in the specialty areas of clinical, counseling, community, school, experimental, human factors, industrial/organizational, social/personality, biobehavioral, and neuroscience. Other psychology alumni are attending professional programs in medical school, law school, social work, special education, library and information science, audiology, criminology, rehabilitation counseling, and education. Locations of these programs include universities such as: Boston College, Case Western Reserve, Chicago, Columbia, Connecticut, Denver, Duke, Emory, Florida, Georgia, Harvard, Illinois, Indiana, Johns Hopkins, Kent State, LaSalle, Loyola, Marquette, Maryland, Michigan State, Minnesota, North Carolina, Northwestern, Ohio State, Pittsburgh, Southern Methodist, Temple, Texas, Texas A & M, Tufts, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest, Widener, Wright State, and Xavier.
Opportunities for student research
The department strongly encourages student research, helps students develop their research skills through their course work, and has created a number of opportunities for advanced students to engage in independent research. These include independently designed projects in our Research courses, Directed Studies, Independent Studies and Senior Research. The department has several research labs equipped with computing, networking, and multi-media technology.
Several summer research opportunities with faculty are available through the Anderson Research Assistantships and other departmental awards. Over recent summers, psychology students have been supported by awards that enabled them to work with faculty on research projects. Some examples of students' research projects include "Practice-Based Improvements in the Temporal Resolution of Orientation Sensitivity," "Beyond the Solution: Learning About Categories During the Course of Solving Problems," "The Effects of Video Game Ownership on Children's Development," "Environmental Aesthetics from the Perspective of a Dynamic Theory of Perception," "Exploring the Consequences of Political Issue and Gender-Emotion Stereotypes on Candidate Evaluation," "Context Specificity of Restraint-Induced Stress in the Attentuation of Spontaneous Recovery," "Effects of Brief Daily Neonatal Isolation on Subsequent Caffeine-Mediated Play and Social Behavior in Juvenile Rats," "The Role of Parental Attunement During Shared Book-Reading among Children With and Without Hearing Impairments," "Reinstatement in Appetitive Conditioning with Rats: Effects of an Extinction Cue," and "The Effects of Recall Format and Interview Technique on Eyewitness Memory."
Many Psychology majors choose to complete a Senior or Honors Research project under the supervision of a faculty sponsor. Some examples of these year-long independently designed projects include: "An Assessment of Integrating Ultrasonic Vocalizations into a Sensory Pre-conditioning Paradigm with Rats," "Athletic Performance in Division III Track and Field Atheletes: The Effects of Stress and Coping," "Determining Cortical Dynamics for Orientation Discrimination," "The Effect of Contextualy Appropriate Musical Cues on Memory for Public Events in the Healthy Elderly," "Specificity of Autobiographical Memories for Positive and Negative Academic Experiences of College Students with Learning Disabilities," "The Impact of Racial Identity on the Adjustment of African-American Children in Foster Care," "Factors Related to and Differences between Indian and American Students' Attitudes Toward Dating and Marriage," "Evaluation of a Voluntary Military-Style Residential Treatment Program for Youth with Conduct Disorder," and Readiness for Mental Health Treatment and For Changing Substance Use in Clients with Co-occurring Disorders: A Comparison of Client and Therapist Perceptions."
As a result of their close collaboration with faculty, many Psychology majors and recent graduates have presented results of their research along with their advisors at professional meetings including the American Psychological Association, American Psychological Society, the Association for Behavioral Analysis, Child Health Psychology Conference, Cognitive Neuroscience Society, Eastern Psychological Association, Midwestern Psychological Association, Nebraska Conference on Motivation, Society for Research in Child Development, and the Vision Sciences Society.
Following their research experiences, students have also co-authored scientific, peer-reviewed journal articles with Denison faculty members. Dr. Robert Weis recently co-authored a paper for the Journal of Personality Assessment entitled "Construct validity and clinical utility of the Rotter Incomplete Sentences Blank (RISB): Evidence from clinic-referred and nonreferred adolescents" with Denison students Erin Toolis '08 and Brittany Cerankosky '08. Denison students Kristen Strong '06 and Kei Kurosawa '06 co-authored a paper titled "Hastening Orientation Sensitivity" for the Journal of Vision with Dr. Nestor Matthews.
Who are our professors?
Department Chair and Associate Professor Sarah L. Hutson-Comeaux (Ph.D., Purdue University) teaches courses in Personality Psychology, Social Psychology, Research Methods, and Statistics for Behavioral Sciences. Her current research interests include the stereotypes and consequences of women's and men's emotional expressions.
Visiting Assistant Professor Nida Bikmen (Ph.D., City University of New York) teaches courses in Introductory Psychology, Psychology of Diversity, and Social Psychology. Her research focuses on social identities, particularly ethnic and national identities. Her current research program focuses on the consequences of social identities in terms of academic achievement, engagement in collective action, and intergroup relations within the context of international migration and interethnic conflict.
Visiting Assistant Professor Diane Bonfiglio; (Ph.D., The Ohio State University) teaches Introduction to Psychology, Health Psychology, and Personality. Her research intereests include studying social support as a moderator of physiological responses to stress as well as studying gender differences in various cardioprotective factors.
Associate Professor D. Cody Brooks (Ph.D., University of Vermont) teaches Psychology of Learning, History and Systems of Psychology, and Psychology of Addictions. His research is on the basic learning and memory processes that influence treatment and the relapse of unwanted behaviors after treatment (e.g., anxiety and substance abuse disorders).
Assistant Professor Seth Chin-Parker (Ph.D., University of Illinois) teaches Cognitive Psychology, Research in Cognitive Psychology, and Research Methods. His research interests focus on how people acquire knowledge (e.g. category learning), and how that knowledge both influences and is influenced by later cognition.
Associate Professor Gina A. Dow (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) teaches Development in Infancy and Childhood (including a community service component), Adolescence, and seminars on cognitive and social development and development and social policy. Her research is on the development of memory and categorization in young children, as well as on literacy acquisition in children with and without hearing loss.
Associate Professor Frank L. Hassebrock (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) teaches courses and seminars on Adult Development and Gerontology, Cognitive Psychology, and Memory. His research focuses on the cognitive organization and functional uses of autobiographical memories.
Professor Harry Heft (Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University) teaches Environmental Psychology, History and Systems of Psychology, Cultural Psychology, and seminars on perceptual theory. His research is on environmental perception and the relationship between the environment and child development. His book, Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Baker, and the Legacy of William James's Radical Empiricism,was published by Erlbaum, in 2001.
Associate Professor Susan Kennedy (Ph.D., Ohio State University) teaches courses in Introductory Psychology, Biological Psychology, Psychopharmacology and Neuroscience. Her research is on stress-related changes in the immune and endocrine systems in human and non-human animals, how stress alters responses to drugs and the development of stress-induced physiological responses.
Associate Professor Nestor Matthews (Ph.D., Brown University) teaches Sensation and Perception, Research Methods, Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences, a seminar on the Cognitive Neuroscience of Music. His research interests include topics such as human vision, auditory perception and psychophysics.
Associate Professor David P.J. Przybyla (Ph.D., SUNY-Albany) teaches Social Psychology, Organizational Psychology, and Human Sexuality. His current research program includes the study of physical attractiveness variables, contraceptive and safe sex education, and the study of brand personality. He also serves as director of Denison's program in Organizational Studies.
Vice President for Student Affairs and Professor Samuel J. Thios (Ph.D., University of Virginia) researches the effects of mainstreaming children with disabilities and gender differences in language.
Assistant Professor Robert Weis (Ph.D., Northern Illinois University) teaches Research Methods, Abnormal Psychology, Clinical Psychology and Field Experience in Psychology. In these courses he emphasizes the science of clinical psychology and the interdependence of psychological research and clinical practice. Dr. Weis's clinical and research interests are in the prevention and treatment of conduct problems in children and adolescents.
Visiting Assistant Professor, part time, Stephanie Gray Wilson (Ph.D., Vanderbilt University) teaches Introduction to Psychology and a seminar on the Psychology of Language. Her research interests include adult language processing, narrative comprehension, and memory for spatial information.
For more information about the department and curriculum, go to:
or contact:
Sarah Hutson-Comeaux, Chair
Department of Psychology
Blair Knapp Hall, Room 404C
Denison University
Granville, Ohio 43023
Phone: (740) 587-6675
Fax: (740) 587-5675
E-mail: hutson@denison.edu