Learn about the faculty of the Psychology program at Bard. Contact Program Director Frank Scalzo here.
Justin Dainer-Best, Associate Professor in Psychology
he/him | Preston 128 | [email protected]
Professor Dainer-Best is interested in how positive and negative emotions change the way people think about themselves and the world around them. More broadly, he is interested in the genesis and maintenance of depressed mood. His work focuses on identifying the best methods for understanding how people who are depressed think. Professor Dainer-Best’s research continues to ask questions about how people who are depressed describe themselves—and how to increase positive self-description. For instance, past work showed that adults with low mood will learn to describe themselves more positively after imagining future positive social situations. This work continues at Bard. The Affective Science Lab uses clinical research methods to identify the factors underlying mood disorders. Work in the lab uses samples of adults, online and in person, across the range of depressive symptoms.
Sarah Dunphy-Lelii, Associate Professor in Psychology
she/her | Preston 102 | [email protected]
Professor Dunphy-Lelii’s undergraduate education focused on child cognitive development, after which she became project coordinator for the Cognitive Evolution Group at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette, studying cognition in chimpanzees. Professor Dunphy-Lelii then pursued graduate work with human preschoolers on very similar theoretical topics—for example, the ways that young individuals think about the minds of others, and how they reason about unseeable behaviors such as thoughts, beliefs, and desires. She became intrigued by how the specific case of autism might shed some light on these same topics—in particular, how different children learn to distinguish self from other in terms of perspective-taking, memory, and imitation. Professor Dunphy-Lelii spent a recent sabbatical in Kibale National Park, Uganda, following wild chimpanzees; at Bard, her interests in young children’s social cognition, children with autism, and nonhuman primates influence her ongoing research and teaching.
Principal Investigator of the Child Development Project.
Principal Investigator of the Child Development Project.
Tom Hutcheon, Assistant Professor in Psychology
he/him/his | RKC 130 | [email protected]
Professor Hutcheon’s research focuses on cognitive control, which is defined as the ability to select relevant sources of information in the face of distracting or competing sources of information. As everyone has experienced, the efficiency of cognitive control varies. At times we find it easy to sit down at our computers and work on a paper. At other times we end up checking our email every three minutes. What causes this variability in performance? Professor Hutcheon’s research seeks to understand the mechanisms that support cognitive control, the factors that influence the efficiency of cognitive control, and how these are influenced by healthy aging. To address these issues, Professor Hutcheon uses a variety of behavioral and statistical techniques including computational modeling and response time distribution analyses.
Principal Investigator of the Attention and Performance Lab.
Principal Investigator of the Attention and Performance Lab.
Elena Kim, Visiting Associate Professor in Psychology
she/her/hers | Preston 118 | [email protected]
Elena Kim is interested in the interface between psychology and gender studies with a focus on violence against women and crisis intervention for survivors of aggression. Topics such as child marriage and bride kidnapping practices in Kyrgyzstan, social norms underpinning violence against women, institutional organization of psychological service and sexual abuse have been at the center of Elena’s research and teaching. She has led funded projects investigating campus sexual harassment, intersections between gender violence and higher education, sexual and reproductive health, and perception of gender. Elena joins the Bard Psychology Program from American University of Central Asia (AUCA), where she has served as chair of the Department of Psychology; cochair and cofounder of the Center for Critical Gender Studies; and head of the Division of Social Sciences.
Natalie Markowitz Wittlin, Assistant Professor in Psychology
she/her/hers | Preston 104 | [email protected]
Professor Wittlin's research explores how people experience both their own and other people's genders, with a focus on affirmation and denial of identities. She has a particular interest in bodies and physical appearances and how they figure into gender-related psychological processes. Questions Professor Wittlin has explored in her research include: What stereotypes do cisgender people hold about transgender people's appearances? How do cis people respond to feedback about the gendered nature of their own physical appearances? Does the mental health of trans youth change as they take steps to align their bodies with their identities through medical transition? Professor Wittlin conducts research at the intersections of social, clinical, and developmental psychology and has also worked in the fields of public health and education. Her research is both experimental and correlational, and she works with both adults and adolescents, collecting data online, as well as face-to-face.
Kristin Lane, Associate Professor in Psychology
she/her/hers | Preston 106 | [email protected]
Professor Lane is interested in how social thought, feeling, and behavior operate in a social context. With robust empirical evidence from the last few decades demonstrating how much of mental life takes place outside our conscious awareness has come the realization that people may hold two sets of attitudes toward a given object. Professor Lane is interested in implicit attitudes and beliefs (those that exist outside the bounds of conscious awareness and cannot be verbally reported evidence). In particular, her research focuses on implicit attitudes toward and beliefs about members of different social groups (race, class, gender, etc.). She investigates the fundamental ways in which such attitudes, identities, and beliefs operate: How do they form, and how are they connected? At the same time, Professor Lane is interested in ways in which such cognitions operate in the real world, and how an understanding of them can be applied to domains outside of the lab. Recent research explores the role of implicit attitudes and stereotypes in the gender gap in science participation.
Principal Investigator of the Social Psychology Lab.
Principal Investigator of the Social Psychology Lab.
Frank Scalzo, Associate Professor in Psychology
he/him/his | Preston 101 | [email protected]
The Bard Behavioral Neuroscience Laboratory provides research opportunities in several areas of neuroscience. These include invertebrate behavior, immunohistochemistry, behavioral pharmacology, neurobehavioral teratology, and neuroanatomy. Laboratory research integrates the research interests of students and faculty and is focused on understanding the behavioral and neurobiological effects of exposure to environmental and other chemical substances whose primary mechanism of action is through the nervous system. Research is conducted using developing zebrafish (Danio rerio) as an animal model. Zebrafish provide an excellent model system for investigating a variety of environmental and pharmacological manipulations on neurobehavioral development in part due to their rapid growth and transparency during the larval stage that allows for the visualization of neuronal and other structures. Current research is focused on understanding the functional role of n-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor systems in zebrafish and how these systems can be perturbed by environmental and chemical insults. Behavioral, anatomical, psychopharmacological and artificial intelligence techniques are used in these investigations.
Additional Faculty of Note
Sayed Jafar Ahmadi, Research Scholar in Psychology
he/him/his | [email protected]
Bard College welcomed Dr. Sayed Jafar Ahmadi as a Research Scholar in the spring of 2022. For about two decades, he lectured at Kabul Education University and worked on the development of psychology in Afghanistan. His career has included collaborations with Hunter College, Monash University in Australia, and Bedfordshire University in England. He has also led several research projects in Afghanistan. His research focuses on psychological interventions for children and adolescents who have experienced trauma or migration. He tries to find effective techniques to deal with the damages caused by conflict and migration. Aside from trauma treatment, he also works on understanding the impact of trauma on personal growth and how to make it a positive experience. It is Dr. Ahmadi’s interest to develop effective interventions for autistic children. Additionally, he has been measuring psychological indices and the development and improvement of psychometric tools.
In Memoriam: Richard Gordon, Professor Emeritus and Research Professor in Psychology
Professor Gordon taught at Bard College for nearly forty years until his retirement in 2008. Richard Gordon was beloved and widely admired. He was uncommonly friendly and compassionate. As a consistently active member of the Bard community, he displayed intellectual rigor, exceptional candor, modesty, and independence. Professor Gordon helped build the Psychology Program alongside his two closest colleagues, Frank Oja and Stuart Stritzler-Levine. During his more than three decades at Bard, he was admired for his teaching and advising, especially on Senior Projects. His most significant academic research and publications were on eating disorders. Professor Gordon pioneered the understanding of those conditions as related to, if not contingent on, the structure and character of a society. His book Anorexia and Bulimia: Anatomy of a Social Epidemic, a classic on the subject, released as a second revised edition and was translated into many languages. He was a remarkable intellect, teacher and advisor, with whom conversation was always a pleasure. He possessed genuine curiosity in others. He was naturally a person of gentleness who nonetheless had an acute sense of humor, a resilient curiosity and a striking absence of arrogance. Richard Gordon’s originality, civility, kindness, and artistry will be missed.