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Professor Carroll Izard’s “Emotion Course” trains teachers to use puppets and story-telling to help Head Start youngsters learn from emotional experiences. Now, Izard and his team of researchers are adding new components to the groundbreaking program.

In a challenging economic environment that has seen programs across the country eliminated and funding from all sources declining, the Psychology Department has shown a positive trend in external funding. In fact, between 2000 and 2004, total funding tripled; it has remained steady over the last four years.

As any parent or caregiver will tell you, figuring out how to keep an infant happy can be a challenging task. Understanding how infants as young as three months old synthesize and catalogue information is the much more difficult task Paul Quinn tackles in his infant cognition research.

Does the language one speaks affect the way one thinks? Do people who speak different languages see the world differently? Professor Anna Papafragou has always been interested in these questions about the relationship between language and thought. An Assistant Professor of Psychology with a secondary appointment in Linguistics, Papafragou studies the relationship between linguistic and conceptual representations in both children and adults. She has gathered data in several countries – Mexico, Turkey, Korea, Greece and Germany, among others – using many different methods. Now, her work is taking another bold step, using sophisticated new eye-tracking techniques to collect data from young children in Greece.

A student-advisor relationship is a two-way street. Graduate students gain valuable training and support, advisors gain new ideas about research. But why do some grad students say mentors are the key to their success?