Faculty Research Interests
Tomorrow Arnold (Ph.D., Pennsylvania State University)
Dr. Arnold’s research focuses on identifying biobehavioral factors that influence alcohol and other substance use within the context of aging. Dr. Arnold is particularly interested in understanding how individual differences in emotion regulation and stress reactivity and 2) sociocultural factors. She is currently engaging in a project to examine intergenerational transmission of substance use behaviors, beliefs, norms, and attitudes across three generations. She has taught undergraduate courses in introduction to psychology and research methods in addition to serving as a research mentor for undergraduate and MS students.
*Accepting new students for the 2023-2024 academic year
Kristen Jennings Black (Ph.D., Clemson University)
Dr. Black’s primary research interests are in the area of Occupational Health Psychology. Specifically, she studies workplace stress, recovery experiences, social support, and employee health, with a focus on high-stress work environments. Her recent focus is on perceptions of stress in the workplace, as well as organizational and workgroup norms around stress. She is also broadly interested in vulnerable workgroups, such as low-income workers experiencing financial vulnerability, and applying research to develop interventions and resources to protect and promote worker health. In addition to her research, she is also engaged in consulting work in the areas of employee safety and engagement.
You can find out more about my current and past work by visiting my lab website: https://sites.google.com/mocs.utc.edu/kristen-j-black
Amanda Clark (Ph.D., University of Waterloo)
Dr. Clark’s research focuses on assessing cognition and everyday life function in the healthy, the aging, the injured, and the malingering. Her Assessing Cognition Lab (ACL) develops, adapts, and tests assessments that are first, reflective of one’s actual competence in daily life, and second, effective at dissociating participants based on both injury status, veracity, and severity. Through this work, they are contributing to the literature on how performance differs between those who have genuine impairment and those who malinger, how and why genuinely impaired individuals make errors in complex, everyday tasks, and how that information can be used to develop strategies for the prevention of these errors in the young, old, and impaired. Dr. Clark integrates her research in the courses she teaches: Principles of Neuropsychology, Biological Psychology, and Psychology of Aging.
To learn more about the ACL, please visit: https://sites.google.com/mocs.utc.edu/assessing-cognition-lab
Christopher J. L. Cunningham (Ph.D., Bowling Green State University)
Dr. Cunningham teaches organizational psychology, organizational development and change, and quantitative/qualitative research methods to graduate students in the M.S. program in industrial-organizational (I-O) psychology. He also teaches select undergraduate core courses in psychological research methods, statistics, assessment development, and professional ethics and career planning. His current research addresses multiple OHP topics, including need for resource recovery and recovery from occupational stress, the influence of individual differences in personality and fitness on the stress process, and issues regarding work-nonwork role integrations. He is also involved as an adjunct clinical research professor at the UT College of Medicine/Erlanger Hospital campus, where he is involved with projects that seek to improve healthcare provider health and well-being at work, as well as efficiency on the job. Dr. Cunningham also serves as the Graduate Program Director for UTC's M.S. degree program in I-O Psychology. Click here to access the website for Dr. Cunningham's Healthy and Optimal Work (HOW) Lab.
Bret Eschman (Ph.D., University of Tennessee)
Dr. Eschman is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist whose research focuses on developing new methods for quantifying individual differences in visual cognition. Using a variety of eyetracking techniques, he is interested in the development of attention, perception, and memory during infancy and early childhood and how those differences predict later cognitive, social, and language outcomes in children and young adults. Specifically, his work aims to identify children at-risk for language, social, and cognitive delays and the factors (e.g., health disparities stemming from differences in socioeconomic status) that may contribute to these individual differences.
To learn more about his lab (the Visual Memory and Attention Development Lab) and to see a comprehensive list of his most recent publications, visit: https://vmad.weebly.com/
*Accepting new students for the 2023-2024 academic year
Ralph Hood (Ph.D., University of Nevada)
Dr. Hood is a social psychologist whose major interests are in philosophical psychology and the psychology of religion. He holds appointments as Professor of Psychology and Leroy Martin Professor of Religious Studies. Dr. Hood is co-founder of the International Journal of the Psychology of Religion and a past editor of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. He is past president of APA's Division 36 and a recipient of its William James award for excellence in research, as well as its Mentor and Distinguished Service awards. His major research interests are reflected in his publications. He is co-author of The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach, editor of The Handbook of Religious Experience and co-editor of Measures of Religiosity. Other books include Dimensions of Mystical Experiences: Empirical Studies and Psychological Links; The Psychology of Religious Fundamentalism, Blood & Fire, Them That Believe; The Power and Meaning of the Christian Serpent Handling Tradition; The Semantics and Psychology of Spirituality: A Cross-Cultural Analysis; and Psychological and Spiritual Transformation in a Substance Abuse Program: The Lazarus Project.
Ashley Howell (Ph.D., Ohio University)
Dr. Howell is a licensed clinical psychologist who specializes in anxiety-related disorders. Broadly, her program of research focuses on interpersonal fear. Her specific interests include fear of social evaluation and post-victimization stress—both of which contribute to the development of anxiety-related disorders such as social anxiety disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Dr. Howell uses a multi-method, biopsychosocial approach to understanding mechanisms of anxiety and traumatic stress. Measures used in her lab (by both Dr. Howell and her graduate students) often include one or more of the following: diagnostic and trauma history interviews, self-report questionnaires, neuropsychological assessments (e.g., DKEFS, WASI, WCST), psychophysiology (e.g., skin conductance [SCR/EDA], electromyography [EMG], photoplethysmography [PPG], functional near-infrared spectroscopy [fNIRS]), and eye-tracking. Under the mentorship of Dr. Howell, students can gain marketable skills with state-of-the-art equipment and softwares, obtain advanced-level knowledge about anxiety and traumatic stress, mentor undergraduate research assistants, publish papers and/or research posters, and have firsthand research experience. To learn more about the Understanding Mechanisms of Anxiety and Trauma (U*MATr) lab and our current projects, you can visit our website by clicking here: https://u-matr.weebly.com/
*Accepting new students for the 2023-2024 academic year
Brian O'Leary (Ph.D., Tulane University)
Dr. O'Leary's research interests focus on the effects of organizational justice on individual, group, and organizational performance. This is an outgrowth of his interest in the area of racial diversity in the workplace and employment discrimination law, as the ultimate goal of the civil rights movement was to create a just society and a correspondingly fair workplace. He is also interested in examining worker perceptions of organizational support from a multi-directional perspective rather than the top-down viewpoint currently dominating the literature.
David F. Ross (Ph.D., Cornell University)
Dr. Ross is interested in developmental and social psychology. He conducts research on children's and adults' eyewitness memory and on adults' views of children's believability as witnesses. He has edited several books on the topics of children's and adults' eyewitness testimony, and consulted with judges and attorneys on children's and adults' eyewitness issues. Dr. Ross teaches courses in Social Psychology, Psychology and Law, and Developmental Psychology.
*Accepting new students for the 2023-2024 academic year
Jill Talley Shelton (Ph.D., Louisiana State University)
Dr. Shelton is the director of the Cognitive Aging, Learning, and Memory (CALM) lab, and both undergraduate and graduate students play an integral role in her research program. In the CALM Lab, we conduct research designed to translate basic cognitive science to better understand everyday human cognition. We are currently using behavioral and eye-tracking approaches to investigate how cognitive, motivational, and contextual factors in the environment influence people’s ability to remember to complete their goals (termed prospective memory). The CALM lab team examines how prospective memory evolves over the adult lifespan, but we are particularly interested in improving academic and self-care goal completion in college students. Another focus of our research is to develop and evaluate experiential learning programs, such as serving as an undergraduate teaching assistant or engaging in inter-generational dialogue. The goal of such programs is to foster professional and personal growth in college students and community members. For more information, please visit the CALM lab website: https://sites.google.com/mocs.utc.edu/shelton-calm-lab
*Accepting new students for the 2023-2024 academic year
Ruth Walker (Ph.D., The University of Akron)
As a feminist developmental psychologist, with specialized training in adulthood and aging, Dr. Walker’s research broadly focuses on the study of social inequalities across the lifespan. Her interest is in both the impact of social inequalities as well as how to ameliorate said inequalities through targeted interventions. Her research has looked at how ageism and sexism intersect to impact how individuals are treated at home and in the workplace. She has also studied the impact of stigma and bias on transgender peoples’ perceptions of their ability to age successfully and their need for care in later life. Since her time working on bystander intervention programming to prevent sexual assault in graduate school, she has collaboratively studied the perceptions of victims of sexual assault. Her current research initiatives continue to focus generally on ageism, sexism, anti-LGBT bias, perceptions of sexual assault survivors, and interventions to improve health and well-being in later life.
*Accepting new students for the 2023-2024 academic year
Amye R. Warren (Ph.D., Georgia Institute of Technology)
Dr. Warren is a developmental psychologist with research interests in memory and language skills in preschool and school-aged children. Her current research applications include children's testimony in legal cases, training programs to improve the skills of those who interview child witnesses, perceptions of child abuse allegations, and juvenile interrogations and confessions. She is also working with law enforcement officers to assist in evaluating and improving their training to deescalate crisis situations and encounters with autistic individuals or other challenges. Dr. Warren regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in developmental psychology (child development and applied developmental) as well as graduate courses in teaching psychology and research methods.