The Department of Psychology and Neuroscience has Google Drive folders that may be of interest to undergrads:
This month, the Petrovich lab published two papers.
Rebecca Shteyn, former graduate student Danielle Lafferty and Gorica Petrovich have published a paper in Physiology & Behavior:ĚýImpact of satiety on palatable food associative learning and consumption in male and female adult rats
Read it here:Ěý
Zoe Irving and former graduate student Eliza Greiner and research assistants Mark Indriolo and Zhe Liu have published a paper in Brain Structure & Function:ĚýActivation patterns in male and female forebrain areas during habituation to food and context novelty
Read it here:Ěý
Congratulations to graduating neuroscience seniors Tracy Aggrey-Ansong and Haley Echols for winning two Ever To Excel awards! In a ceremony on Monday, April 28, Aggrey-Ansong was given the St Ignatius Award for Faith in Action and Echols was given the Welles Remy Crowther award.
See the other awardees here:Ěý/content/bc-web/offices/studentaffairs/sites/student-involvement/leadership-development/ever-to-excel-awards/award-recipients.html
Congratulations to our Dean's and Sophomore Scholars who were honored at a dinner event last night!Â
Congratulations to the Psychology & Neuroscience 2025 Dean's and Sophomore Scholars! This year's recipients are:
Neuroscience
Sophomores: Madison Grady, Peyton Zarate
Juniors: Yudam Chang, Tyler de Grandpre, Madeleine Pinney
Psychology
Sophomores: Kelly Choi, Faith Hochgesang, Lizzy Lamprey, Sarah McNickle, Dave Nelson, Angel Wang
Juniors: Miracle Hodge, Pearl Miller, Veronica Wells
Former Lab Tech David Williams and the McDannald Lab have published an article on fear conditioning in rats in the journal eLife.
Read it here:
A 2024 paper authored by psychology professors Gene Heyman, Ehri Ryu, and Hiram Brownell titled "Evidence that intergenerational income mobility is the strongest predictor of drug overdose deaths in U. S. Midwest counties" has been featured in the Boston College Chronicle, the ĽŻĂŔÂé¶ąNews website, and EurekAlert, the news service of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Heyman was interviewed for the article, explaining the goal of the research and its findings.
Read the article here:Ěý//content/bc-web/sites/bc-news/articles/2025/spring/income-mobility-and-opioid-overdoses.html
Dr. Maureen Ritchey, associate professor and director of the Memory Modulation Lab, has been awarded the 2025 Early Investigator Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists. Congrats!
PhD student Trystan Loustau, along with her advisor, Liane Young, have published an article on Time.com, discussing how we can learn from people with Autism to be more mentally resilient, especially when it comes to social media. You can read the article, titled What People With Autism Can Teach Us About Mental ResilienceĚýłó±đ°ů±đ:Ěý
Elizabeth Kensinger is quoted in a Boston Globe article on why adults in their 30s and 40s are reporting memory lapses:Ěý
Congratulations to ĽŻĂŔÂé¶ąAlumna Samantha Cohane ('24) for her recent publication in Frontier with Barry Schneider! Read the paper, based on her undergraduate research, here:Ěý
Gene Heyman, Ehri Ryu, and Hiram Brownell recently published a paper in the October issue of the International Journal of Drug Policy, titled:ĚýEvidence that intergenerational income mobility is the strongest predictor of drug overdose deaths in U.S. Midwest Counties.
Professor Amy Tishelman was recently interviewed by NPR about transgender youth healthcare for AirTalk. Listen to the podcast here:
In discussing older adults’ mental wellbeing, the NY Times describes a study conducted by Profs. Jackie Ford and Elizabeth Kensinger, graduate student Sandry Garcia, and postdoc alums Eric Fields and Tony Cunningham.
Read the article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/08/briefing/mental-health-anxiety-depression.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb
Dr. Amanda Chu, Dr. Stefano Anzellotti, and the McDannald lab publish "A fear conditioned cue orchestrates a suite of behaviors in rats" in eLife.
Read here:Ěý
Elizabeth Kensinger was on the Speaking of Alzheimer's Podcast along with ĽŻĂŔÂé¶ąResearch Associate Victoria Fisher and social work graduate student Josue Velasquez Higueros. They spoke on "Shaping the future of the aging & Dementia workforce"
Listen here:
Professor Elizabeth Kensinger was interviewed about memory by the Boston Globe, in the context of a current murder. trial.
Read the article here:
Liane Young was recently interviewed for the Templeton Ideas podcast. On it, she discusses her research on theory of mind and emotions in moral judgment and behavior.
Listen here:Ěý
Dr. Amy Tishelman was recently interviewed by Meghna Chaktarabarti about trans youth care for an episode of the NPR program On Point.
Listen here:Ěý
Incoming PhD students Helen Zheng and Seoyeon Bae Awarded Research Fellowships from the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy.
Gorica Petrovich and former graduate student Eliza Greiner have published in Brain Structure and Function: Recruitment of hippocampal and thalamic pathways to the central amygdala in the control of feeding behavior under novelty.
PhD student Jacob Glassman has been awarded a Fellowship from the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy. He will be pursuing research on developmental intergroup conflict resolution.
Graduate student Marcus Trenfield has been awarded an National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Additionally, research associate Lizy Szanton received an honorable mention from the same organization.
Graduate student Isaac Handley-Miner receives two grants, one from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to study comparatively how humans and large language models assess the validity of claims, and another from the Berkeley Initiative for Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) to understand researcher practices and attitudes towards reporting pilot studies in psychology.Â
Allison Pellegrino, a Neuroscience major from the class of 2024, spoke at last night's Dean’s and Sophomore Scholar Banquet. Allison spoke thoughtfully of her own experiences both in and out of the classroom at BC, encouraging the sophomore and junior scholars being honored to discern their future by focusing on both the destination and the journey that will get them to that destination.
Congratulations to Allison and to our Dean's and Sophomore Scholars!
Frances Grace Hart, who graduated in December 2023 with a BA in Psychology, has been selected for the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Grace's research proposal was titled "A computational investigation of the influence of death attitudes and religious identity on high risk behaviors." While at Boston College, Grace completed the Undergraduate Concentration in Clinical Psychology and her Honors Thesis research was conducted under the supervision of Dr. Courtney Beard at McLean Hospital and Dr. Karen Rosen. Â
The following Psychology & Neuroscience students were selected as Dean's Scholars and distinguished Sophomore Scholars for the Morrisey College of Arts and Sciences for 2024.
Sophomores: Dylan Berry, Yudam Chang, Victoria Fertig, Miracle Hodge, Talia Matonti, Le (Sarah) You
Juniors:Â Sarah Bibace, Yinan (Lemon) Ding, Jack Doppke, Abigail Miller, Layla Oubssis, Anastasia Prussakova, Adelaide Royer, Hanan Sjah, Zhaoquan (Harold) Wang
They will be recognized at the Dean's Scholar banquet on Wednesday, April 10, in the Murray Function Room, Yawkey Athletic Center at 6:00 p.m.
Frances Grace Hart, who graduated in December 2023 with a Psychology BA major,received a Fulbright Award for the 2024-2025 academic year. The award is to work at Leiden University in the Netherlands on a project using ecological momentary assessment data to evaluate the relationship between meaning in life and suicidal ideation. She completed the Psychology and Neuroscience Honors Program under the supervision of Dr. Courtney Beard at McLean Hospital and Dr. Karen Rosen. She also completed the requirements for the Concentration in Clinical Psychology. In the next few years, Grace plans to apply to graduate school to get her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology.
Josh Hartshorne and his collaborators were awarded a $1.4 million NSF grant to support massive online cognitive experiments.
Currently serving on EPA's Board of Directors, Jef has been elected to serve as President for the organization's annual meeting in 2026, which will be held here in Boston in February, 2026.
Elizabeth Kensinger's book Why We Forget and How to Remember Better has won the 2024 Associate of American Publishers PROSE Award in the “Biomedicine and Neuroscience” book
Fourth year Ph.D student Sandry Garcia was featured in the "In The Trenches" section of the monthly newsletter from the Vice Provost for Research. Garcia, who works in the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab, studies how emotion affects memory in younger and older adults. Her most recent paper was published in the Cognition and Emotion Journal.
Read Sandry's paper here:Ěýhttps://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02699931.2023.2270202
Natalia Ladyka-Wojcik, a postdoc in the Memory Modulation Lab, was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
Faith Hochgesang and Peyton Zarate, students in Elizabeth Kensinger's fall course, "What Is Memory, and Why Does It Matter? The Science of Remembering" had their final essays for the class—written as blog posts—accepted for inclusion at Psychology Today:
Gorica Petrovich, former graduate student , and undergraduate honors thesis students Mary Witt and Stephanie Moran have published in Brain Structure and Function:Ěý.
Sara Cordes, Hiram Brownell, and Stacee Santos publish in npj Science of Learning:Ěý
Mike McDannald publishes a viewpoint on Pavlovian fear conditioning in the Journal of Neuroscience:Ěý
Marie Diagne received the Culture and Cognition Travel Award for 2023 with funding to attend the Culture and Cognition Pre-conference in November. This award is made possible by a grant awarded to the organizers by the National Science Foundation.
Sandry Garcia, Maureen Ritchey, and Elizabeth Kensinger published in Cognition and Emotion:Ěý
Preston Thakral and former undergraduate honors thesis student Connor Starkey have published in Creativity Research Journal: "Are false memory and creative thinking mediated by common neural substrates? An fMRI meta-analysis"
Amy Tishelman was appointed to a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) .
Amy Tishelman was awarded an R01 grant through NICHD at NIH: "Equitable Measurement of Care Disparities and Needs in Intersex Youth/Youth with Variations in Sex Development." MPIs: Strang, Tishelman and Crerand (contact site: Children's National Hospital).
Matt Zimbler discusses the challenges of having a roommate with Boston.com:Ěý
Josh Hartshorne's work is discussed in The Guardian:Ěý
We’re participating in the Cambridge Science Festival! On Sept 27 at noon, join Prof. Elizabeth Kensinger for a “lunch and learn” on the topic of memory. Learn more and sign up here:
Joshua Hartshorne was interviewed about language-learning apps on NPR's Forum, produced by KQED:Ěý
Angie Johnston coauthored a paper that was accepted in the Journal of Comparative Psychology:Ěý
Josh Hartshorne has been awarded another grant from NSF, entitled "Enabling large-scale citizen science data collection for the social, behavioral, and economic sciences."
Joshua Hartshorne was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation: "Bootstrapping a Corpus of Endangered Languages." This three-year grant will allow critical tests of current theories of language acquisition.
Joshua Hartshorne was quoted and his work discussed in the Wall Street Journal:Ěý
The McDannald lab received a five-year NIMH grant to study brainstem threat computation.
Josh Hartshorne publishes in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General—
Barry's article about a longitudinal study of disadvantaged children in Reggio-inspired preschools in Italy has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Behavioral Development.
Ryan’s paper "" is published in Social Neuroscience the same week he graduates.
Congratulations to our Ph.D. and M.A. recipients, and to Stefano Anzellotti for the GSAS Teaching and Mentorship Award!
Ph.D. recipients: Ryan Daley, Paul Deutchman, Haley Fritch, Lindsey Hildebrand, Ryan McManus
M.A. recipient: Julia Maybury
Isaac Handley-Miner publishes new work on the psychology of truth, along with colleagues in BC’s departments of Philosophy and Communications:
Emily Schwartz is the first author of a new SCCN lab paper that just came out in Journal of Neuroscience:Ěý
Prof. Elizabeth Kensinger talked about memory with hosts Isabella and Elizabeth on the .
Alyson Wong, Sara Cordes, Paul Harris, and Nadia Chernyak published a new article in Developmental Science:Ěý
The Department of Psychology and Neuroscience is pleased to announce that six of our majors have been named Sophomore Scholars, and nine have been named Dean’s Scholars for 2023! Congratulations to these outstanding, intellectually curious students!
These are the highest academic awards given to sophomores and juniors, resulting from an MCAS-wide competition of the top 4-5% of students in each class. Each department nominates outstanding students through letters of recommendations summarizing their achievements, and a committee in the Dean’s Office makes the final selections.
Sophomore Scholars
The Sophomore Scholar award, according to the Dean’s Office, “recognizes their current distinction and their promise for the future.”
The Psychology and Neuroscience Department’s Sophomore Scholars this year are: Tracy Aggrey-Ansong, Yinan Ding, Jack Doppke, Emily Shi, Paterson Tran, and Grace Wen.
Dean’s Scholars
Dean’s Scholars are selected “on the basis of their overall academic performance, the recommendations from their departmental faculty, their co-curricular initiatives, and the sense of purpose with which they approach their future.”
Psychology and Neuroscience majors who are Dean’s Scholars this year are: Julianna Barbaro, Julia Bowers, Michael Colantuno, Luisa Esquivel, Nicholas Gordon, Chang Lu, Obinna Onyekachiuzoamaka, Allison Pellegrino, Wenshuo Qin, Caroline Walsh, and Wiebke Willebrandt.
Congrats again to all of our honorees!
The Lifelong Learning program at Carleton University (Ottawa) has hired Barry Schneider to teach non-credit mini-courses (in person or virtual) on the depiction of mental illness in film. Barry's appointment to the adjudication committee of the Slovenian Research Council has been renewed.
Molly Byrne and Angie Johnston co-authored a paper published in the journal Animal Cognition:Ěý
The April  features a publication by members of the Social and Cognitive Computational Neuroscience Lab:Ěý
Alyson Wong, class of 2020 and current lab coordinator in Sara Cordes’ lab, has been awarded a prestigious Department of Defense graduate fellowship.
December graduate Johnny Lu presented his honors thesis work with Jim Russell at the 25th Mind Brain Research Day, sponsored by the Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and the Carney Institute for Brain Science at Brown University. His poster won the first-place award for the Diversity Research category.
Nathan Liang, full-time RA working with Liane Young and Gregg Sparkman, has received an NSF GRFP and will be joining Laura Niemi’s lab in the Psychology Department at Cornell as a graduate student in the fall.
Josh Hartshorne was featured in an op-ed by Tom Edsall in the New York Times, as was work by Liane Young and former student Laura Niemi:Ěý
Josh Hartshorne, former postdoc Yujing Huang, and former lab coordinator Lauren Skorb published a new paper on how children learn verbs in Language Development Research:Ěý
Aidas Aglinskas, Emily Schwartz, and Stefano Anzellotti have published in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience:Ěý
Richard Ahl, Katherine McAuliffe, and ĽŻĂŔÂé¶ąalumna Kelsey Hannan have a new article in Cognitive Development, showing that online data collection methods work well with children:Ěý
Congratulations to Maureen Ritchey, who has been granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor!
Mengting Fang, Aidas Aglinskas, Yichen Li, and Stefano Anzellotti have a new article in Journal of Neuroscience:
The McDannald lab has received a two-year NIMH grant to study a novel dopamine circuit promoting threat learning.
Karina Hamamouche and Sara Cordes have published a new article in Cognition:Ěý
Regan Bernhard published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. Regan uses evidence from neuroimaging to provide support for the idea that engaging in thought without belief requires inhibiting an automatic tendency to believe everything you think:Ěý
Gregg Sparkman has received a 2023 Sloan Research Fellowship. See ĽŻĂŔÂé¶ąNews for more information on the award.
Joshua Hartshorne was awarded a CAREER grant from the NSF titled, "How Many Intuitive Physics Systems are There, and What Do They Mean for Physics Education?"
Julia Maybury, who will obtain her M.A. from our department as part of the Fifth Year M.A. program, will be pursuing her Ph.D. at Cambridge University as a member of the 2023 cohort of Gates Cambridge Scholars! Here is the .
In a new Brain Sciences paper, Emily Schwartz and Stefano Anzellotti show that the information in different layers of deep neural networks trained to recognize faces challenges the classical view of abstraction in face perception: .
Mike McDannald has joined the Editorial Board at .
The Association for Psychological Science has named Gregg Sparkman a Rising Star: " are in the earliest stages of their research careers post-PhD and have already advanced the field with their innovative work. Congratulations to this year’s honorees!"
The Social and Cognitive Computational Neuroscience Lab has published in Frontiers in Neuroscience. The paper, by Stefano Anzellotti and former lab coordinators Mengting Fang and Craig Poskanzer, is titled .
Frances Grace Hart, an undergraduate Psychology major, won this year's Scott Lilienfeld Memorial Prize for Scientific Thinking in Clinical Psychology for her essay in a competition sponsored by Cambridge University Press. A description of the award:
The untimely death of Professor Scott O. Lilienfeld in September of 2020 was an enormous loss for psychological science and a personal loss for Douglas Bernstein, Bethany Teachman, and Bunmi Olatunji, with whom he co-authored the 9th edition of Introduction to Clinical Psychology. Professor Lilienfeld’s contributions to the book were many, the most significant of which was to provide strong and consistent support of its focus on the need for scientific thinking about research and practice in clinical psychology.
To memorialize the important role he played in psychological science, and in the book, Professors Bernstein, Teachman, and Olatunji—in cooperation with Cambridge University Press—have established the annual Scott O. Lilienfeld Memorial Prize for Scientific Thinking in Clinical Psychology. The prize includes a certificate, a check for $500, and $250 in credit for Cambridge University Press books.Â
Each year’s winners will be chosen by Professor Lilienfeld’s co-authors from among students who read the 9th edition in their clinical psychology course and submitted a paper of 3 to 5 pages (double-spaced, excluding references) that is organized like the book’s Thinking Scientifically features, but focuses on a topic other than those addressed in those features. The winning paper will be the one judged as best illustrating the scientific thinking abilities that Professor Lilienfeld was so passionate about promoting.
Additional information about Professor Lilienfeld can be found in obituaries at  and at .
Elizabeth Kensinger's new book, Why We Forget and How To Remember Better, written with neurologist Andrew Budson and published by Oxford University Press, has been deemed a "must read" by the Next Big Idea Club.
Preston Thakral has a new paper in the journal Cerebral Cortex:
Richard Ahl and Katherine McAuliffe publish in Cognition:
Gordon Kraft-Todd and Liane Young publish in the Journal of Positive Psychology:Ěý.
Minjae Kim, Liane Young, and Stefano Anzellotti publish in Social Cognition:Ěý.
Craig Poskanzer and Stefano Anzellotti have a new paper in Network Neuroscience: .
Paul Deutchman and Katie McAuliffe have a new paper in Developmental Psychology: .
Gene Heyman has published two papers.
±ő˛ÔĚýJournal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior:Ěý
In Evaluating the Brain Disease Model of Addiction:Ěý
Sandry Garcia received the Sallie P. Asche Travel Award for the 2023 Dallas Aging and Cognition Conference. She will present a poster titled "Testing the List Composition Effect on the Emotional Enhancement of Memory in Younger and Older Adults."
Grace Hart won the Bronze Medal in the 2022 , a mock-therapist competition. She is the first undergraduate student to ever win a medal.
Preston Thakral and recent graduate Natasha Barberio have published a paper in Memory & Cognition titled "Constructive episodic retrieval processes underlying memory distortion contribute to creative thinking and everyday problem solving."
WBZ interviewed Elizabeth Kensinger on memories for past storms:Ěý.
Aidas Aglinskas and Stefano Anzellotti have a new paper with the National Library of Medicine: .
A new paper, , by current and former Petrovich lab members was published in Brain Structure and Function.
Jasmin Strickland will start a tenure-track faculty job at Durham University in January. She has also just published in Nature Communications: .
Elizabeth Kensinger, with Jaclyn Ford, Maureen Ritchey, Ehri Ryu, and Preston Thakral, has been awarded a five-year R01 grant from the National Institute on Aging to study how aging influences the way emotional events are remembered. Â
Joshua Hartshorne was awarded a new grant from the National Science Foundation, titled "An open-course ecosystem for massive online experiments and citizen science."