What are your areas of research? Finding like-minded people...

[randoperson]

Broadly, I'm interested in gender and sexuality. My research has focused on analyzing the values underlying the DSM definition of mental disorder through an interdisciplinary analysis of the removal of homosexuality from the DSM, as well as an investigation into the implications that definition has for the asexual community. In addition to my conceptual work, I have surveyed mental health professionals' beliefs about and attitudes towards asexuals and people who could identify as asexual.

 

Other topics I'd like to study: the role of local processing in sexual objectification, dynamical systems approaches to the development (a)sexual and gender identity across the lifespan, and the interaction between the sexual system and the attachment system.

Edited January 19, 2015 by randoperson

[cogsci1]

Anybody else doing choice and decision making? I'm interested in top-down vs. bottom-up processing on complex decisions, in particular how the structure of our environment changes the top-down rules that we create to govern behavior. For example, do we reason differently about likelihood when we are presented with an environment where we have to make our own inferences about the prevalence of things than when we are told how prevalent they are? How do people intuitively deal with other-worlds logic, if at all? What does all this have to do with our commonsense notions of morality?

 

Sorry for being vague, but I don't want to publish active areas of research on the web. If anybody is interested in something like this, though, I'd be interested to talk more about it!

[CogPsych2015]

Oh, oh, pick me! Haha. My research is on decision making, mostly in risky contexts. Broadly, I'm interested in how feedback can be manipulated to improve decisions and how individuals represent choices. As I tell non-academics, I study why people, in general, are bad at making decisions:).

[L83Ste]

I love that people are replying to this thread! Hopefully, some cool research ideas can come out of it.  

[TXInstrument11]

Thank you! Most people (like my family) just think it is weird  Your research area sounds interesting too! 

Yeah, LOL, some people actually pale and their eyes bug out when I tell them about some of the research and books I've read. They look at me like I'm Hannibal Lecter or something! Are you more interested in academic or applied settings? I applied to two criminology programs on top of my general social psych list and, at the moment, hope to steer towards academic research, though I do appreciate the flexibility provided by a chance at criminology. 

[Lexifer]

Yeah, LOL, some people actually pale and their eyes bug out when I tell them about some of the research and books I've read. They look at me like I'm Hannibal Lecter or something! Are you more interested in academic or applied settings? I applied to two criminology programs on top of my general social psych list and, at the moment, hope to steer towards academic research, though I do appreciate the flexibility provided by a chance at criminology. 

haha exactly! I get a lot of "oh.....why would you want to study that?" and I've accidentally scared coworkers with some of my books before. I definitely like the more academic side of things, though I do have some experiences on the applied side. I also applied to a Criminology program! I have a minor in Crim and talked to my POI already and she is down with my current interests, but my preference would be to stay in psych 

[Chubberubber]

Anyone else out there interested in the emotional well-being of older adults and the effect of aging on their affective experience?

[Journey2015]

Someone should study short term and long term well-being outcomes of potential graduate students during and post the application process :-/

There has to be be both developmental and clinical implications.

I, for one, am simply losing my mind...

[psych face]

ROFL

[Impatiently Waiting]

Anyone else out there interested in the emotional well-being of older adults and the effect of aging on their affective experience?

 

Ooo! I love this topic! My interests have moved in a very different direction, but this area has always fascinated me. Best of luck to you!

[Chubberubber]

Ooo! I love this topic! My interests have moved in a very different direction, but this area has always fascinated me. Best of luck to you!

Thanks! It's still a relitively small field, but one that is actually growing quite fast and will likely get even more funding in the future, so I highly encourage anyone to become more familiar with it! Good luck to you too!

[MyDogHasAPhD]

Cool thread! My research is essentially a social psychological approach to public health issues. I want to specifically study preventing HIV and cancer, focusing on social influence. Truly, I would be happy studying the prevention of just about any disease that has a behavioral component, but I knew I had to narrow it down for grad school.

Up my research alley! I'm interested in how risky sexual behaviors are used as maladaptive coping mechanisms in minority adolescents. I'm particularly interested at developing intervention and prevention programs geared toward adolescent minority populations with historically higher HIV, STD, and teen pregnancy rates.

Secondary interests include how social cognition and implicit bias influence intergroup relations and also how stigma infiltrates into structural institutions.

Edited January 21, 2015 by MyDogHasAPhD

[TenaciousBushLeaper]

I would like to know more about this. A friend of mine has become recently interested in studying linguistics in a sense, but in a different way than you. He wants to look into how word usage might reinforce stereotypes or create more division of groups than intended. 

 

I love the idea of studying online language processing. This is definitely important in this day and age! 

 

It seems like your friend is gravitating towards the Sapir Whorf hypothesis, a "language dictates thought" way of thinking. You should advise him to read the literature regarding this. 

 

I'm interested in online language processing & production! I'm particularly interested in how we use our abstract representations of language and item-specific representations to make predictions in real time about upcoming language stimuli (and relatedly, what happens when these representations clash). Right now I'm looking at this in a sentence processing context where we use abstract constraints but also item-specific knowledge to shape predictions about word order in binomial expressions, but I'm also interested in a variety of other contexts this happens in -- how frequency affects phonetic production, how the use of a particular construction influences our predictions about semantic & pragmatic meaning, how expectations of information density shape expectations about upcoming words, how task relevance changes what representations we use during processing, etc. Fun stuff!!!

In a way, I'm kinda working one level down of you in the whole *language investigation* thing, kinda lol. BTW when you say "how frequency affects phonetic production, what exactly do you mean?   

[juilletmercredi]

Anyone else out there interested in the emotional well-being of older adults and the effect of aging on their affective experience?

 

Me! But more recently.  I'm a social/health psychologist and most of my research focuses on the intersection between substance use, HIV, and mental health.  I'm interested in how substance interacts with poor mental health, and how they both influence HIV risk behavior and the management of HIV.  So for older adults, one of my newer interests is aging with HIV - I'm interested in how aging with HIV affects older adults' emotional well-being and mental health and vice versa; how neurocognitive decline might affect the management of HIV disease; how comorbidities due to age (especially cardiovascular disease) may interfere with HIV disease progression; and how social networks and support might mitigate those experiences.

 

I'm also interested in how substance use, mood disorders, and other psychosocial and structural factors (like poverty, race, childrearing, history of physical or sexual abuse, incarceration, etc.) influence sexual risk behavior, adherence to HIV medication, and HIV disease progression in younger adults, too.