Research
In the Department of Psychology, we're committed to the communities we serve. Our research labs are spaces for innovative work that tackles real-world issues such as the underlying processes that affect anxiety in children and adolescents, how early life experiences shape physical and mental health throughout life, and the causes and consequences of trauma, violence and abuse. Undergraduates, graduate students and faculty come together in our state-of-the-art facilities to pose challenging questions and discover cutting-edge solutions that reach beyond the bounds of conventional psychological science. With twenty active research labs, you'll conduct hands-on research that makes a difference.
Initiative
Promoting Resilience in Offspring and Targeting Early Childhood Trajectories (PROTECT) Lab
About
Angela Narayan, PhD, director
In the PROTECT Lab, we study the intergenerational transmission of risk and resilience across families and generations from developmental psychopathology and trauma-informed perspectives. We are particularly interested in understanding how early childhood experiences shape lifespan pathways to developmental adaptation and maladaptation, and specifically, how promotive and protective factors buffer children and parents from experiencing stress, psychological impairment and relationship difficulties. Our research seeks to promote resilience in parents and children by deterring the intergenerational transmission of maltreatment, violence exposure and poverty in low-income families. Current projects center on the pregnancy and early childhood periods, and examine family processes such as romantic relationship functioning, parenting behavior, the transition to fatherhood and infant attachment. We are as much interested in the early experiences of parents – how a parent's childhood shapes his or her parenting – as we are interested in how parenting shapes childhood experiences of offspring in the next generation.
Initiative
Reducing Inequities in Student Education (RISE) Lab
About
Kamilah Legette, PhD, Director
The Reducing Inequities in Student Education (RISE) Lab investigates ways individual and institutional racial biases impact youth academic performance and social-emotional and identity development. Using a combination of methods including physiological, observational and interview data, we investigate ways racial biases are perpetuated within schools as well as the influence of these biases on development from early childhood through adolescence. The goal of this work is to inform effective interventions, school policy changes and teacher preparation programs to optimize healthy child development.
Initiative
Social Context & Development Lab
About
Julia Dmitrieva, PhD, director
Phone: 303-871-3979
We are a group of researchers and students interested in learning more about how the people we interact with, our biology and the experiences we have shape our development. In particular, we are interested in parent-child relationships, the effect of childhood and adolescent experience in predicting college adjustment, and how the transition into college is important for later adjustment. We study these questions in a variety of ways and have several projects going on within the University of Denver, as well as within the community. One study aims to see how people make decisions throughout the developmental spectrum and investigates how adolescents and adults discuss life decisions with high school friends. Analysis includes how individuals feel about these decisions, social influences that drive the outcome and the cognitive processes involved.
Initiative
Social Context and Inequality Lab
About
Heidi Vuletich, PhD, director
The Social Context and Inequality Lab works to expand understanding of the psychology of place, particularly as it pertains to intergroup dynamics and social perceptions. For example, we investigate how inequality across contexts influences social judgments, perceptual biases, and behavior. We ask questions like: are implicit biases linked to environmental features, particularly those signaling inequality? What explains geographical differences in bias? How do people perceive places and the people who live there? How do places shape behavior?
We also focus on the psychology of time. We examine how perceptions of time shape beliefs and behavior. We focus on questions such as: What are people’s estimates of how long it takes to develop certain skills? How do those perceptions shape what they prioritize and how they view themselves? Are there social inequities in time affordances and social differences in time perceptions? How do these differences impact outcomes?
Initiative
Social Detection Lab
About
E. Paige Lloyd, PhD, director
Our lab investigates the determinants and consequences of person perception, with an emphasis on implications for social inequality and discrimination. We form impressions of others with surprising ease, and with shockingly little information. Others’ faces, bodies and language all command attention, combining to provide rich impressions of others’ traits, emotional states, motives and social status. But not all cues are created equal, and similarly, not all people are treated equally. Some of our studies have examined race-based biases in deception judgements, gender stereotypes explaining disparities in pain care and equitable policies, and race-based differences in mental representations of police.
Initiative
Social Perception & Attitudes (SPA) Lab
About
Max Weisbuch, PhD, director
Phone 303-871-4893
The Social Perception and Attitudes (SPA) Lab examines how attitudes, stereotypes and personality are shaped by visual perception of the social world. We have discovered that individuals' self-esteem, attitudes and stereotypes are shaped by the patterns of facial expressions, clothing and facial diversity they encounter. We also take an ecological approach to social thought. We assume that people respond to the self-relevant meaning conveyed by combinations of social cues. For example, we have demonstrated that perceivers' responses to subliminal emotion expressions depend on the (social) identity of the emoter. The SPA lab emphasizes the early stages of social thought but we do so with an eye towards identifying and solving social problems. For that reason, we examine whether and how the "basic" phenomena uncovered in the lab might be applied to problems in the "real world."
Initiative
Sokol-Hessner Lab
About
Peter Sokol-Hessner, PhD, director
This lab studies the psychology and neuroscience of affect and decision-making. Our research combines computational behavioral models of value and learning with psychological theories of affect and self-regulation. By leveraging psychology, economics and neuroscience, we seek to develop a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of affect and decision-making. The lab's approach is captured in two main goals: first, to identify links between unique components of affect and specific decision processes, and second, to understand how techniques used to change affect can be used to change choices. Our work here combines quantitative economic models of decision-making with physiological measurements and/or brain imaging to shed light on how affective phenomena interact with specific decision processes. Other work of ours uses computational modeling to think about self-control success and failure as the result of optimal choices based on evaluations of the limits of our options and environment.
Initiative
The Relationship Center
About
Wyndol Furman, PhD, director
Phone: 303-871-3806
The Relationship Center studies children's and adolescent's relationships with friends, parents, siblings and romantic partners in order to understand and improve them. Thousands of families have participated in our projects and our goal is to understand their relationships - what makes them healthy and happy, and what causes problems. By understanding more about relationships, we can help people to improve their relationships and how we may be able to prevent problems or help those who are having relationship difficulties. We give workshops to schools and consult with teachers and other professionals about ways of improving relationships among children and adolescents in the community.
Initiative
Traumatic Stress Studies (TSS) Group
About
Anne P. DePrince, PhD, director
Phone: 303-871-7407
The TSS Group pursues several lines of research with both youth and adults to understand the consequences of trauma on individuals, particularly violence exposure. We are a community-engaged, feminist, anti-racist research team committed to intersectional research that disrupts gender-based violence and other forms of oppression. Living up to these values is a goal and a process for all members of our team, and leads to better trauma science. For example, collaborating with community partners enables our team to be part of addressing questions of public concern from public perspectives for impact. We apply our basic research findings to intervention and prevention work and our research draws on multiple methodologies (e.g., cognitive tasks, clinical interviews, survey methodology) as well as theories from diverse psychological perspectives to address both basic and intervention questions.
Initiative
Visual Perception, Emotion & Cognition Lab
About
Tim Sweeny, PhD, director
Phone 303-871-2191
The VPEC Lab studies visual perception in order to understand how neural and cognitive mechanisms shape what we see and hear, and how perceptual processes guide our social and emotional behaviors. We also collaborate to examine the role of perceptual processes in clinical and social contexts. We use psychophysics and modeling to understand how basic visual processes allow people to see and understand both simple and complex patterns like shapes, facial expressions and gaze. We collaborate with researchers at DU and other institutions to examine clinical, affective and social outcomes. Our goal is to use vision science to answer core questions about the human mind and the nature of visual awareness while making an impact on multiple disciplines within psychology via collaboration.
