| Dr. Ascione
has conducted research related to humane education and children's
attitudes toward animals. More recently, he has focused his attention
on child and adolescent cruelty to animals. This research examines
the common roots of violence toward people and animals and is
directed at identifying an early indicator of at-risk status in
children. An invited speaker at local, national, and international
conferences (including recent conferences in Tel Aviv, Geneva,
Dublin, Prague, Florence, Rome, Brussels, Gothenburg, Cambridge,
and Amsterdam), Dr. Ascione has collaborated with human services
social work and child development staff working with abused children,
with youth corrections personnel, and with state shelters for
women who are battered. His work has been supported by the Humane
Society of the United States, the Massachusetts Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the American Society for Prevention
of Cruelty to Animals, the American Humane Association, and the
Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Dr. Ascione has provided information
or testimony for the state legislatures of Utah, Ohio, Colorado,
and Washington, regarding cruelty to animals legislation. |
| Dr.
Carl Cheney's current research interests include diet selection
by herbivores, taste aversions, self-organizing systems, behavioral
pharmacology, and effective education. |
| Dr.
Susan Crowley's current research interests are focused on
the prevention and early intervention of internalizing disorders
(e.g., anxiety and depression) in children. She is also interested
in the assessment of internalizing disorders in minority and majority
children, and working towards a better understanding on the constructs
of anxiety and depression, and their relationship to each other
(e.g., the tripartite model of affect). Finally, Dr. Crowley is
interested in the application of more sophisticated analytical
techniques such as structural equation modeling to clinically
relevant questions. |
| Dr. Donna Gilbertson's
research broadly focuses on applied behavior analysis in school
settings and training teachers and parents to respond to children's
learning and behavioral adjustment problems. She is currently
interested in examining a three step process by first developing
and validating curriculum based assessment (CBA) procedures that
are relevant for a diverse population of children. Second, she
is investigating the degree that efficient assessment tools such
as curriculum based assessment determines a more effective intervention
that will benefit children with academic and behavior problems.
Finally, she plans to continue investigating strategies to ensure
that teachers and parents use treatments designed to help children
in their care. All students that are interested in working directly
with children, in school, or academic and behavioral problems
are strongly encouraged to contact Dr. Gilbertson at 797-2034,
dgilbertson@coe.usu.edu.
|
| Dr.
Gretchen Gimpel Peacock's research is currently focused on ADHD. She
is interested in both the assessment of ADHD and its treatment,
particularly through behavioral techniques such as parent training.
She is currently conducting a treatment study (with the help of
numerous graduate students) on the use of parent training as an
intervention for children with ADHD. She is also working with
several graduate students who are investigating ADHD symptoms
in preschool children to gain knowledge on what behaviors are
typical for this population as well as what factors (parenting
behaviors, parenting stress, etc.) may be correlated with ADHD
behaviors at this age. |
| Dr. Steve Lehman's
research is focused on reading comprehension and text processing.
He is conducting research on the influence of the relevance of
reading material on comprehension and reader interest. He is also
interested in the influence of multimedia on comprehension and
learning from electronic text in web-based training modules. |
| Dr.
Kevin Masters' main area of research interest is health psychology
though he is also interested in psychotherapy outcome and assessment.
Current projects include investigations of pre-surgical psychosocial
variables as predicators of outcome from low back surgery, religiosity,
and cardiovascular reactivity among older adults, and social support
preferences among low back patients. |
| Dr.
Grayson Osborne states, "I continue to be interested in the
problems of stimulus equivalence and, more broadly, stimulus relations,
in general. To that end, we are studying the behavior of college
(and sometimes, elementary) students as they react to conditional
discriminations containing taxonomic and thematic relations. The
former involves matching-to-sample by kind, and the latter involves
matching to sample by theme or story. Developmental psychologists
have been interested in this for ages mostly as the tendency to
categorize one way or the other relates to age and a stage. We
are more interested in determining what makes one relation more
likely to control responding than the other, and have focused
on the composition of the stimulus array itself rather than age
or stage. Of course, we would like to show that we can predict
and control which of the two relations controls the subject's
response." |
| Dr.
Karl White's current research is primarily focused on early
identification of hearing loss. He directs the National
Center for Hearing Assesment and Management
(NCHAM) which conducts research and provides training, technical
support, information dissemination, and data management software
to assist hospitals and state Departments of Health to implement
effective universal newborn hearing screening programs. He continues
to do some work related to the costs and benefits of early intervention
and preschool programs for young children and evaluation of various
educational programs. |
