Colloquium Series
Departmental Colloquium Series
During the academic year, the department of psychology invites respected scholars to give lectures on research and theory in contemporary psychology. Please see the schedule below for more details and room locations. All are welcome to attend and engage with the Northwestern Psychology Community.
*Currently colloquiums are being held both via zoom & in-person, 3:15pm to 4:30pm CST.
November
Friday, November 11th 2022
Speaker: Dr. Adriana Galvan (Host: Robin Nusslock)
Topic: Neural Sensitivity to Messaging in Adolescents and Adults
Abstract: Exposure to media content is ubiquitous in daily life. Contemporary adolescents and young adults are particularly engaged with content that may elicit emotional reactions. In this talk I will describe a series of studies designed to examine how emotionally-evocative stimuli, including cigarette warning labels and tweets inclusive of negative, discriminatory content, are processed in adolescents and young adults and the extent to which they induce changes in emotional states. Findings from the cigarette cue study indicate that aversive smoking-related images can reduce craving and engage fronto mesolimbic and insular systems in adolescent smokers. Results from the Tweet Study support the hypothesis that negative stimuli experienced through social media evoke negative affect, which relates to neural and executive functioning. Collectively these studies demonstrate how negative media content may be particularly impactful on the developing brain and behavior.
Location: Swift Hall Room 107
December
Friday, December 9th, 2022
Speaker: Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett
Topic: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Location: Zoom TBD
January
Friday, January 13th, 2022
Speaker: Dr. Gina Poe (Host: Ken Paller)
Topic: Mechanisms at work during sleep that serve memory and mental health.
Abstract: Mounting evidence from human and animal studies supports the idea that during sleep the brain is busy eliminating debris and redundant synapses that would interfere with efficient waking functions. Circuits are also modified to smoothly incorporate new information into old schema. Coordinated sets of elecrophysioloical and neurochemical conditions that are incompatible with wakefulness must be met during sleep in order to accomplish these essential tasks. We will briefly review the most important traits of sleep for memory and mental health, dive into a few recent studies that reveal important requirements we have overlooked in the past, and explore what these discoveries indicate for efficient memory and good mental health, developmental processes, aging, including implications for the interpretation of past studies.
Location: Swift Hall Room 107
February
March
Friday, March 10th, 2022
Speaker: Dr. David Chae (Host: Onnie Rogers)
Topic: Causes of Death: Racism and Other Macro-Social Determinants of Health and Psychobiological Mechanisms of Disease”
Abstract:Racial inequities in health represent a significant social and moral dilemma, as well as a serious public health concern. In addition to creating and reinforcing oppressive environmental conditions, racism is an ambient toxin that can undermine health more insidiously, including via biological processes underlying multiple disease pathways. A social-psychobiological framework can elucidate the channels through which multiple levels of racism compromise health throughout human development.
Location: Swift Hall Room 107
April
Friday, April 14, 2022
Speaker: Dr. William Warren
Topic: TBD
Abstract: TBD
Location: Swift Hall Room 107
May
Friday, May 12th, 2022
Speaker: Dr. Neil Anthony Lewis, Jr (Host: Galen Bodenhausen)
Topic: Cultivating Unequal Minds: Meaning Making in a Fragmented Democracy
Abstract: The United States has long been, and continues to be, a highly segregated society. When societies separate groups of people in the ways that we do in the U.S., that separation has not only economic, political, and sociological consequences, it also affects how people think and communicate about social issues and interventions to address them. In this talk, I will share recent findings from my program of research that has been using the United States as a context to examine how patterns of segregation and other forms of social stratification seep into the mind and affect how people perceive and make meaning of the world around them. I will also discuss the consequences of those meaning-making processes for people’s judgments, motivations, and decisions across multiple domains. I will conclude with implications of this research for social scientific theories, and the practical application of those theories.
Location: Swift Hall Room 107
About Dr. Neil Anthony Lewis, Jr
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