Information about the Human Emotions Lab (Dr. Carroll Izard)

 

Are you interested in going to graduate school? Getting research experience as an undergraduate is one important thing you can do to show your interest and commitment to your field. Being an Undergraduate Research Assistant will give you valuable research skills, the opportunity to work closely with persons specializing in your field, a deeper understanding of scientific research, and a great opportunity to get a detailed letter of recommendation for graduate school.

My name is Jenny Anderson and I am a research specialist here at UD. I work in the Human Emotions Lab (McKinly 181), directed by Dr. Carroll “Cal” Izard. In our lab, we study the emotions and their roles in the development of normal and abnormal behavior and we use this knowledge to design interventions to help children.

During the 2006-2007 school year, we will be focusing on a follow-up study for an emotions-centered preventative intervention program in Wilmington Head Start Centers. We depend on our Undergraduate Research Assistants to collect pre-and post-test data that we use to determine the effectiveness of our intervention.

As an Undergraduate Research Assistant working on this project, your primary task would be to test the vocabulary and emotion knowledge of preschoolers in Wilmington Head Start and elementary school classrooms and/or to perform in-class observations of children. This would be a hands-on, high responsibility research experience that would provide an opportunity to interact directly with a low-income, ethnically-diverse population. Please note that the experience may require some travel to Wilmington; but we will be pairing you up into teams so having a car is preferable but not necessary. In addition, you may be involved in other research tasks, such as putting together testing packets or entering data into a statistical program.

We have a few requirements for working in the lab:

(1) You should be a psychology major or early education major and have a GPA of at least 3.0.

(2) We ask that you sign up for 3 credits, which translates to up to 9 hours of work per week. We would like you to keep two mornings (9-1:00) per week available.

(3) The most important thing we ask of you is reliability, i.e., showing up where and when you are scheduled for work.

(4) At the end of the semester, we have a short paper requirement, 3-5 pages, reviewing a research article.

If you are interested in this opportunity, please sign up! Again the course # is PSYCH 366-040, or PSYCH 466-040 if you have taken 366 in the past.

If you have any questions or concerns my email is janderson@psych.udel.edu and my office phone number is 831-2700. Undergraduate Research Assistants make our research possible. We can’t do it without you!