Faculty Listing • UCLA Department of Psychology

Name	Area	Research Question
Paul R. Abramson	Interdisciplinary	What is the interface between sexuality and the law?
Howard S. Adelman	Clinical Psychology	How can schools best address barriers to learning and teaching and re-engage disconnected students?
Avi Adhikari	Behavioral Neuroscience	How do interactions between brain regions modulate fear, anxiety and related behaviors?
Robert Asarnow	Clinical Psychology
Bruce Baker	Clinical Psychology	What child, family, and school factors contribute to the heightened risk for psychiatric disorders in youth with developmental delays across childhood and adolescence?
Carrie Bearden	Clinical Psychology	What are the risk factors that lead to the development of serious mental illness in adolescence?
Jackson Beatty	Behavioral Neuroscience
Steve Bennoun		What are the best strategies to support student learning?
Peter M. Bentler	Quantitative	Can statistics for structural equations be improved? Are model-based reliability coefficients better? Can new Guttman scaling rival Rasch or 2PL IRT? Do bifactor rotations or trinary betas ever fail?
Robert M. Bilder	Clinical Psychology	What are the biological bases of cognitive stability and flexibility, and how do the relevant systems interact to impact working memory, creative cognition, and psychopathology?
James Bisley	Behavioral Neuroscience	Understanding the neuronal mechanisms underlying the cognitive processing of vision
Elizabeth Ligon Bjork	Cognitive Psychology	How can we optimize human learning, retention, and transfer, and how does forgetting play an adaptive role in remembering?
Robert A. Bjork	Cognitive Psychology	How do we learn...and why don’t we understand how we learn?
Jan Blacher	Clinical Psychology	What predicts successful school outcomes for young children with autism spectrum disorder?
H. Tad Blair	Behavioral Neuroscience	How are perceptions, memories, and behaviors encoded by the activity of spiking neurons in the brain?
Aaron P. Blaisdell	Behavioral Neuroscience	What's inside the animal mind?
Idan Blank	Cognitive Psychology	How do different parts of the mind/brain work together such that language "means something"? What mental structures constitute these meanings? How is language related to the rest of “thought”?
Susan Bookheimer	Cognitive Psychology
Julienne Bower	Health Psychology Clinical Psychology	How do stressful experiences influence the body and physical health, and what types of psychological processes and interventions can protect against those effects?
Thomas N. Bradbury	Clinical Psychology	Why do some relationships thrive where others falter?
Tiffany N. Brannon	Social Psychology	How can positive aspects of identity (e.g., pride, a sense of connection) inform (a) solutions to social disparities experienced by negatively stereotyped groups and (b) processes that facilitate intergroup attitude change?
Dean Buonomano	Behavioral Neuroscience	How does the brain tell time?
Li Cai	Quantitative	Broadly speaking, my methodological research agenda involves the development, integration, and evaluation of innovative latent variable models that have wide-ranging applications in social and behavioral sciences.
Bridget Callaghan	Developmental Psychology	How do early experiences influence emotional, cognitive, physical, and brain development in ways that contribute to mental health and illness?
Erica Cartmill	Developmental Psychology
Alan Castel	Cognitive Psychology	How do we remember and why do we forget, and how does this change across the lifespan? How and why do we selectively remember important information, and is this adaptive as we get older?
Denise A. Chavira	Clinical Psychology	How can we optimize the development and delivery of evidence based interventions for underserved communities?
Patricia Cheng	Cognitive Psychology	Why and how do we come to represent the world as we do?
Bruce Chorpita	Clinical Psychology	How can we design systems and treatments that yield the greatest public health impact for children and families?
Andrew Christensen	Clinical Psychology	What interventions are most cost effective in improving couple relationships?
David Clewett	Cognitive Psychology Behavioral Neuroscience	How do emotion and motivation influence attention and memory?
Mark S. Cohen	Cognitive Psychology
Michelle Craske	Clinical Psychology	What are the biopsychosocial risk factors for anxiety and depression and how can they be targeted in order to optimize treatment effects?
Han Du	Quantitative
Naomi Eisenberger	Social Psychology	Why do our social relationships have such a profound impact on our emotional and physical health? Why does being rejected feel painful, whereas being connected to others feels so good?
Craig Enders	Quantitative	What is best way to analyze psychological data with missing values?
Chris Evans	Behavioral Neuroscience
Michael Fanselow	Behavioral Neuroscience	How do we learn, remember and express fear?
Iris Firstenberg	Cognitive Psychology
Craig Fox	Cognitive Psychology	How do people make judgments and decisions under conditions of risk, uncertainty, and ambiguity?
Andrew J. Fuligni	Developmental Psychology	How do sociocultural experience and biobehavioral development interact during adolescence and young adulthood?
Adriana Galván	Developmental Psychology Behavioral Neuroscience	What are the neural mechanisms underlying adolescent behavior?
Tao Gao	Cognitive Psychology	Perceptually grounded intelligence
R. Edward Geiselman	Interdisciplinary	Investigative Interviewing of victims and witnesses.
Karen Givvin	Developmental Psychology	How can teachers help students learn math in a way that students can make sense of, remember, and apply?
Noah Goldstein	Social Psychology
Gerald M. Goodman	Clinical Psychology	Are the key variables for intimate conversation similar to the variables for maintainig close realtionships?, Are uncommon honesty, acceptance, and expressed empathy preictors of durable, satisfying relationships?
Patricia M. Greenfield	Interdisciplinary	How does culture affect human development? How can we integrate psychology with the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, communication studies, political science, and ethnographic arts to answer this question?
Carlos V. Grijalva	Behavioral Neuroscience
William Grisham	Behavioral Neuroscience	How do sex differences in brain and behavior develop? What digital teaching tools are effective in neuroscience education?
Elisheva Gross	Developmental Psychology	How can an understanding of early development improve educational practices, parenting, and policy?
Constance Hammen	Clinical Psychology	What are the risk factors for onset and course of depression, particularly stress, family, interpersonal, and genetic predictors and how they work together?
Jesse Harris	Cognitive Psychology	How do language users incorporate different sources of information to produce sufficiently rich representations? How do linguistic and extra-linguistic information constrain interpretation during sentence processing?
Martie Haselton	Social Psychology	What can evolutionary thinking tell us about our intimate relationships?
Hal Hershfield	Social Psychology	How can we help move people from who they are now to who they’ll be in the future in a way that maximizes well-being?
Tiffany Ho	Clinical Psychology	What is the role of stress in shaping brain development and how do these neurodevelopmental changes influence the etiology, course, and treatment of depression?
Eric W. Holman	Quantitative	What information about cognitive processes can be gleaned from statistical analyses of large data sources such as classifications and languages?
Keith Holyoak	Cognitive Psychology	What is special about human intelligence?
Yuen J. Huo	Social Psychology	What are the psychological barriers to positive social relations and well-being in diverse groups?
Michael R. Irwin, MD	Behavioral Neuroscience Health Psychology	What are the psychological, behavioral, and biological factors that contribute to healthy aging, and what strategies can be delivered to reverse adverse biological mechanisms (i.e., inflammation) and prevent chronic diseases of aging?
Alicia Izquierdo	Behavioral Neuroscience	How does the brain compute past experience, or reward history, to contribute to decision making at the present time? How does this change in addiction?
Kerri Johnson	Social Psychology	How do we form first impressions of other people from only a glimpse of their face or body? How are multiple identities integrated to yield a single impression of another person?
Scott Johnson	Developmental Psychology	How do infants construct representations of the physical and social environment?
Jaana Juvonen	Developmental Psychology	How do school contextual factors (e.g., ethnic composition, organizational structure) affect peer relationships and student well-being? What psychosocial benefits are associated with diversity (and for whom)?
Katherine H. Karlsgodt	Clinical Psychology Behavioral Neuroscience	What can neuroimaging tell us about differences in brain structure and function in individuals with schizophrenia? How do such differences relate to cognition and neurodevelopment?
Benjamin Karney	Social Psychology	How do intimate relationships succeed or fail?
Danielle Keenan-Miller	Clinical Psychology	What are the most effective practices in clinical supervision?
Phil Kellman	Cognitive Psychology	How do we visually perceive and represent objects, shapes, scenes, and events, and how do these processes interact with thinking and learning?
Pamela Kennedy	Behavioral Neuroscience	How do drugs of abuse modify brain cells and circuits to support addictive behaviors?
Barbara Knowlton	Behavioral Neuroscience Cognitive Psychology	How does learning occur in the brain?
Franklin B. Krasne	Behavioral Neuroscience	How do synaptic changes result in learning, as studied in an invertebrate? How are do mammalian fear-learning circuits work, as studied with computational neural models?
Anna S. Lau	Clinical Psychology	How well do evidence-based treatments, developed and tested in research settings, work in community mental health settings serving diverse and disadvantaged families and children?
Steve S. Lee	Clinical Psychology	What factors predict, mediate, and moderate outcomes of children with ADHD and disruptive behavior disorders?
Matthew Lieberman	Social Psychology	Why are our brains wired to be social?
Falk Lieder	Cognitive Psychology	How can we motivate and enable people to embark on highly impactful altruistic projects and pursue them effectively?
Zili Liu	Cognitive Psychology	Why does the world look the way it is, and with many visual illusions? Why does the percept make sense, from an information processing perspective?
Hongjing Lu	Cognitive Psychology	What are the computational mechanisms underlying human perception and reasoning? How might intelligent machines emulate them?
Donald G. MacKay	Cognitive Psychology
Vickie M. Mays	Clinical Psychology
Albert Mehrabian	Interdisciplinary
David J. Miklowitz	Clinical Psychology	What are the roles of family risk and protective processes and family interventions in the course and treatment of bipolar disorder and psychosis?
Gregory A. Miller	Clinical Psychology Behavioral Neuroscience	How does brain function go awry in schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety, and what cognition, emotion, and brain connectivity phenomena help us understand this?
Martin M. Monti	Cognitive Psychology Behavioral Neuroscience	(i) How does consciousness emerge from neural activity? (ii) What is the relationship between language and thought?
Amanda Kay Montoya	Quantitative	How do we account for dependencies in data when exploring questions of how, when, and their combination? Can repeated-measures designs assist in reducing reproducibility issues? What strengths and weaknesses do these designs have?
Hector Myers	Clinical Psychology Health Psychology
Lauren C. Ng	Clinical Psychology	What are effective, accessible, and sustainable ways to improve the wellbeing of individuals, families, and communities around the world who have been affected by trauma?
Keith H. Nuechterlein	Clinical Psychology	What is the nature and role of cognitive deficits in schizophrenia and how can we remediate them to improve the course of this disorder?
Melissa Paquette-Smith		How do we optimize learning across the lifespan?
Carolyn Parkinson	Social Psychology	How do our brains track and encode information about the structure of our social networks? How does social network position impact cognition and behavior? How do we understand and mentally traverse social, spatial, and temporal distances?
Letitia Anne Peplau	Social Psychology
Efrén Pérez	Social Psychology	When and why do social identities become politicized—and with what consequences for mass politics in diversifying nations, like the United States?
Lara Ray	Clinical Psychology Behavioral Neuroscience	How does addiction progress and what treatments best target each stage?
Steven Paul Reise	Quantitative	Do psychological traits apply to all members of a diverse population, or is there important qualitative variation?
Rena Repetti	Clinical Psychology Health Psychology	How do daily stressors and emotions shape the fabric of family life and, over time, the health of parents and children?
Dario Ringach	Behavioral Neuroscience
Jesse Rissman	Cognitive Psychology Behavioral Neuroscience	How does the brain create and retrieve memories, and how do we regulate these processes to achieve our goals?
Theodore Robles	Health Psychology Clinical Psychology	How does the quality of our closest relationships (marital and family) affect our health, and what biological mechanisms explain those effects?
Catherine M. Sandhofer	Developmental Psychology	How do children learn and how does the learning environment contribute?
Philip Sayegh	Clinical Psychology	How do culture and other factors affect care-seeking, assessment, diagnosis, and treatment adherence in ethnically diverse individuals with neuromedical illnesses? How do infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C impact neurocognitive function?
Tara Scanlan	Social Psychology	What creates the psychological commitment to persist in developing one's talent? What are the consequences of developing one's talent?
Stan Schein	Behavioral Neuroscience Cognitive Psychology	What new kinds of molecular cages -- important in biology (endocytosis, viruses), chemistry (fullerenes), materials science (nanotubes), mathematics (polyhedra) and architecture (space frames) -- can we discover?
Christine Dunkel Schetter	Health Psychology Social Psychology	What makes for healthy pregnancy, birth and offspring? Is stress related to adverse outcomes and how?
David O. Sears	Social Psychology	How do race and ethnicity affect American politics -- both in promoting partisanship among ethnic minorities and in eliciting prejudice from whites?
Ladan Shams	Cognitive Psychology Behavioral Neuroscience	How does interaction between the senses affect how we perceive the world, ourselves, and how we learn? How can these interactions be used to improve perception and learning?
Melissa Sharpe	Behavioral Neuroscience	How does our brain construct models of our environment on the basis of our unique experience? And how does this process change in psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia?
Margaret Shih	Social Psychology
Alcino Silva	Behavioral Neuroscience	Molecular, cellular, circuit mechanisms of learning and memory
Jennifer Silvers	Developmental Psychology Social Psychology	How does early adversity impact neurodevelopment? How do children and adolescents regulate their emotions and make decisions?
Annette L. Stanton	Health Psychology Clinical Psychology	What factors promote or impede psychological and physical health in adults undergoing chronically stressful experiences, such as living with a cancer diagnosis, and how can they be targeted in effective interventions?
James W. Stigler	Developmental Psychology Cognitive Psychology	How do people learn things that are hard to learn? Things that are learned over weeks, months, or years? What kinds of teaching methods facilitate deep learning in complex domains?
Jennifer Sumner	Health Psychology Clinical Psychology	How do the experiences of stress and trauma contribute to accelerated aging and risk for chronic disease?
Nanthia Suthana	Behavioral Neuroscience	How does the brain support learning and memory?
Shelley E. Taylor	Health Psychology Social Psychology
James P. Thomas	Cognitive Psychology
A. Janet Tomiyama	Health Psychology Social Psychology	Why do we eat?
Yalda T. Uhls	Developmental Psychology	How do traditional and newer media impact the social behavior of preadolescent and adolescents?
Miguel Unzueta	Social Psychology
Kate Wassum	Behavioral Neuroscience	What are the neurochemical mechanisms of motivation and decision making?
Jill M. Waterman	Clinical Psychology	What factors lead to positive outcomes for families adopting children from foster care, and which therapeutic interventions enhance these factors?
Bernard Weiner	Social Psychology
Andrew Wikenheiser	Behavioral Neuroscience	How do neural representations subserve behavior?
Patrick Wilson	Health Psychology	How psychological processes and socio-contextual factors interact with one another and relate to health behaviors and outcomes in vulnerable populations?
Nancy Woolf	Behavioral Neuroscience
Cindy Yee-Bradbury	Clinical Psychology Behavioral Neuroscience	How do interactions between cognition, emotion, and stress contribute to risk for psychoses and dysfunction in schizophrenia, and do they suggest pathways for intervention?
Dahlia W. Zaidel	Behavioral Neuroscience