Department of Psychology and Neuroscience

Dr. Arnold studies the cognitive mechanisms involved in using language. She is especially interested in how people use language appropriately in context, which involves integrating information from the linguistic signal itself with inferences about the discourse, context, and their interloctutor’s mental state. Her current projects examine the role of experience and statistical learning in the use of discourse cues to pronoun comprehension.

Dr. Bardone-Cone received her undergraduate degree (mathematics & French) from Williams College and her doctorate (clinical psychology) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She started her faculty career at the University of Missouri-Columbia and joined UNC in 2009. She enjoys reading, traveling, exercising, and spending time with her family.

Her research program focuses on eating disorders and body image. She studies etiology and maintenance of eating disorders with particular interests in the roles of perfectionism, self-efficacy, and stress; sociocultural factors, including race, ethnicity, family, and media, in relation to body image and eating disorders; and how to most meaningfully define recovery from an eating disorder.

Dr. Boettiger’s lab investigates atypical neurocognitive function associated with substance use disorders, particularly executive functions subserved by frontostriatal networks.

The goal of Dr. Cohen’s research program within The Cohen Lab is to understand how distinct brain networks interact and reconfigure when confronted with changing contexts, and how this neural flexibility contributes to flexibility in control and the ability to learn. Moreover, she seeks to understand the consequences of dysfunction in this flexibility. To achieve this, Dr. Cohen uses functional neuroimaging to characterize network integration and neural flexibility in a range of contexts, such as changing cognitive demands, transformations across typical development, and disruptions in healthy functioning due to disease. Her lab applies cutting edge multivariate methods from neuroscience, psychology, and mathematics, such as functional and resting state connectivity, graph theory, machine learning, and computational modeling. These methods enable the quantification of rapid, dynamic changes across the entire brain simultaneously, as well as the ability to specify the roles of individual regions or functional connections. She applies these powerful methodological tools to multiple populations, such as healthy young adults, typically developing children, and patients. With this research strategy, she has elucidated important aspects of human cognition, development, and disease, such as how people can maintain focus while ignoring irrelevant events, why adolescents are particularly predisposed to risk-seeking, and what mechanisms of dysfunction underlie impulsive behavior in disorders such as ADHD. The ultimate goal of The Cohen Lab to illuminate the neural mechanisms underlying both successful and dysfunctional behavioral flexibility, learning, and control.

Dr. Daughters has a research focus on etiology and treatment of addiction.

Trained as a social psychologist, Dr. Frederickson’s current scholarly work contributes to both affective science and positive psychology. Her research centers on positive emotions. In particular, she studies how subtle and fleeting states like joy, gratitude, interest, and love alter people’s thinking patterns, social behavior, biological processes, and physical health. Her ultimate goal is to understand how positive emotions accumulate and compound to transform people’s lives for the better.

Dr. Hussong has a research focus on the development of risk and resilience in children and families, particularly the development of gratitude and the development of substance use.

Throughout her career, Dr. Jones has strived to move clinical science beyond the identification of “at-risk” families to more contextualized models of risk and protective processes for specific children and families at-risk for specific negative outcomes. Most recently, she has taken this line of research a step further by conducting applied work that aims to improve service delivery options for vulnerable, yet underserved families. Such work necessitates that she moves beyond the disciplinary boundaries of clinical child psychology to a perspective informed by public health, the intersection of clinical, developmental, and community psychology, and, most recently, telehealth. This multidisciplinary approach is critical for work that demands the utilization of innovative engagement strategies for working with vulnerable and, in turn, often difficult to recruit and retain families.

Dr. Kurtz-Costes has a research focus on the development of adolescents’ academic motivation with particular attention to race/ethnicity and gender as social identities that shape youth’s experiences, goals, and achievement behaviors.

Dr. Muscatell’s research focuses on uncovering the neural, psychological, and physiological mechanisms that link social experiences (e.g., social subordination, stress, discrimination) to mental and physical health. She is also interested in how information from the body, like immune system activation, can feed-back to the brain to influence our thoughts, feelings, and behavior.

She is originally from the Pacific Northwest, so she has an obligatory affinity for craft beer, hiking, and riot grrrl jams. Being a scientist is the best job she could possibly imagine. It’s hard, and she constantly wonders about her ability to do it well, but she loves it.

Dr. Penton is currently interested in how incorporating creative activities in the classroom can enhance student learning of complicated concepts. She is also interested in how positive student-professor rapport can enhance student internal motivation to both learn material in a class and to continue taking classes within the field. In her CURE class, Cellular Electrophysiology Laboratory, students investigate sex differences in how food restriction may alter the activity of taste receptors in fruit flies through changes in the dopamine system. This project continues her interest in how behavioral modifications or drug administration can alter activity within specific neuronal circuits as well as downstream of these circuits.

She is passionate about inspiring others to learn about neuroscience and psychology. She has always been interested in the intersection of the two subjects. When she’s not nerding out over neurons and neurotransmitter receptors, she is painting abstract art in her home studio.

Dr. Sathy is an award-winning Teaching Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill teaching the very classes she credits for charting her own professional career in Quantitative Psychology: statistics and research methods. She was born in India but grew up in a small town in NC and is a proud recipient of public education (K-PhD) in NC, with three degrees from UNC-Chapel Hill.

She is engaged in numerous activities on campus to promote student success, with emphases on: modernizing student support, facilitating broader participation in high impact educational practices, evidence-based approaches to teaching, access and equity for first generation and transfer students, and STEM participation. She is the lead Program Evaluator of the Chancellor’s Science Scholars (CSS), a program aimed at increasing representation of underrepresented students in STEM PhDs modeled after the highly successful Meyerhoff Scholars Program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. She helped in the development and deployment of a data dashboard (My Course Analytics Data; MCAD) that allows instructors to see aggregate data on the demographics of students in their courses as well as their grade distributions by many characteristics (i.e., first generation, underrepresented minority, gender, etc.). She has co-developed with ITS a classroom attendance app that relies on proximity to a bluetooth beacon to check in to class, enabling instructors to quickly visually see who is absent from the class and follow up with student services staff. Lastly, she is involved in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and has a forthcoming chapter in a book on Teaching Statistics that shares the findings of a quasi-experimental study of implementation of the flipped classroom for her statistics course as well as writing a book for a teaching series press on Inclusive Teaching. Her work with Dr. Hogan has been featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and they recently wrote an advice guide for them that has been distributed widely.

Dr. Telzer’s research examines how social and cultural processes shape adolescent brain development, with a focus on both prosocial and risk-taking behaviors, family and peer relationships, and long-term psychological well-being.

Dr. Telzer has authored over 100 publications, and has received numerous awards for her work, including a NARSAD Young Investigator Grant, a Jacobs Foundation Early Career Research Fellowship, an Early Career Award from the Society for Research on Adolescence, the Boyd McCandless Award for Early Career Contribution to Developmental Psychology from the American Psychological Association Division 7, and was named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science. Her research is supported by the National Science Foundation, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, Jacobs Foundation, National Institute of Drug Abuse, and National Institute of Mental Health. In her free time she enjoys drawing biological illustrations, hiking with her dog, and reading.