Dr. Joshua Brown to serve on Steering Committee of the University-Based Child and Family Policy Consortium

Dr. Joshua Brown has been elected to serve as one of five Senior Representatives on the Steering Committee of the University-Based Child and Family Policy (CFP) Consortium.

The Consortium includes over 35 member institutions, and focuses on advancing scientific collaboration on child and family policy issues, cross-disciplinary undergraduate and graduate training to support the next generation of child and family policy researchers, and effective translation of research-to-policy and research-to-practice. The Consortium holds weekly calls and regular web-available presentations by researchers and policy scholars open to all faculty and graduate students in the Applied Developmental Psychology program.

2014 Anastasi Lecture set for October 21st

 It’s Complicated: The Ongoing Saga of Opportunity in America

Speaker: Henry Braun, Boisi Professor of Education and Public Policy, Boston College
When: Tuesday, October 21, 2014 at 5:30 pm
Where: 12th Floor Lounge, Lowenstein Center at 113W. 60th Street, Lincoln Center Campus

The lecture is open to the public. A reception will follow.

Abstract

America has always seen itself as a Land of Opportunity. Over the last four decades, a torrent of data on growing inequality, have led many to doubt that view of our nation. Inequality of opportunity may be both the most fundamental and the most amenable to public and private action. Gross differences in opportunity have consequential implications for intra- and inter-generational mobility, the national economy, civil society and the democratic polity. I will offer a framework for understanding the complex dynamics driving differences in opportunity from birth to adulthood, and how those differences interact with the changing labor market to determine adult outcomes and offer some thoughts on how we can close the opportunity gap.

About the Speaker

Henry Braun is the Boisi Professor Education and Public Policy and Director of the Center for the Study of Testing, Evaluation and Education Policy at Boston College. From 1979 to 2006 he worked at the Educational Testing Service where he served as vice-president for research management and held the title of distinguished presidential appointee. He is a co-recipient of the 1986 Palmer O. Johnson Award of the AERA and a co-recipient of the NCME’s 1999 Award for Outstanding Technical Contribution to Educational Measurement. His interests include school and teacher accountability, the role of testing in education policy, and analysis of large-scale survey data.

For more information, contact David Budescu, Ph.D. (budescu@fordham.edu).

Presented by the Anne Anastasi Professorship in Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology. Additional support by the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences and Psychology Department.

Marital Satisfaction Paper Selected as Editor's Choice

The Journal of Gerontology: Social Science has selected a collaborative paper by faculty members of the Fordham University Department of Psychology, the Jewish Home Lifecare's Research Institute on Aging at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and the Rutgers University Department of Sociology as Editor's Choice for their most recent issue.

Dr. Daniela Jopp, Dr. Laura Sosinsky, and Dr. Se-Kang Kim contributed to the article entitled: "His" and "Her" Marriage? The Role of Positive and Negative Marital Characteristics in Global Marital Satisfaction Among Older Adults.

Dr. Jopp was also recently featured in a CBS2 New York news segment on longevity and aging.

Congratulations to all involved!

Dr. Jopp's Centenarian Research Featured In The New York Times

Daniela S. Jopp, Ph.D. was recently interviewed for an article published in The New York Times about the Fordham Centenarian Study, a research projected directed by Dr. Jopp on the characteristics and experiences of people who approach 100 years of age.

Dr. Jopp discusses some of the main findings of her work, which indicates that people approaching 100 years of age tend to have a positive attitude despite having “on average between four and five illnesses, which are pretty disabling and hinder them from doing the things they want to do.”  Dr. Jopp’s work suggests that the key is their ability to accept and adapt to their impairments. Very old individuals also tend to be extroverted, have strong social networks, and exhibit “self-efficacy,” which is a feeling that they are in control of their own lives. Dr. Jopp also discusses a new phenomenon where, due to longer life expectancies, some parents and children are experiencing old age together, which can create unique challenges for a family.

The full article can be read on The New York Times website here.

Dr. Jopp is Assistant Professor of Psychology in the Applied Developmental Program and the head of the Adult Developmental and Aging Lab and the Fordham Centenarian Study.

A Call to Advocacy: The Past, Present, and Future of Child Well-Being

  The Future Child Advocates of Fordham presents:

A Call to Advocacy: The Past, Present, and Future of Child Well-Being

Wednesday, April 23, 2014  |  8:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

1st Floor Auditorium | Keating Hall | Rose Hill Campus
441 East Fordham Road | Fordham University | NYC

Join members of the Future Child Advocates of Fordham (FCAF) for a multi-disciplinary conference with some of the country’s renowned childcare professionals who will discuss and examine the intersection of social, legal, psychological, and medical approaches to protecting vulnerable youth. Speakers will include:

•    Michael Menconi, FCRH ’15, Founder, President, Future Child Advocates of Fordham, Co-Founder, Future Child Advocates of America

•    Joshua L. Brown, PhD, Faculty Advisor, Future Child Advocates of Fordham, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Fordham University

•    Bernard P. Dreyer, MD, FAAP, Professor, Director of Behavioral Developmental, Pediatrics, NYU Langone Medical Center, Director of Pediatrics, Bellevue Hospital Center, Co-Chair of the Academic Pediatric Association Force on Child Poverty

•    Linda Cahill, MD, FAAP, Medical Director, J.E. & Z.B. Butler Child Advocacy Center, The Children’s Hospital at Montefiore, Associate Professor of Clinical Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine

•    Christine Deyss, MS, Executive Director, Prevent Child Abuse New York

FCAF is a collaboration between J.E. & Z.B. Butler Child Advocacy Center of the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore and Fordham University’s Department of Psychology uses a social justice approach to ending the vicious cycle of child abuse in the Bronx and across America. As a completely student-run organization, FCAF’s primary goals include fundraising for local child advocacy centers, and providing direct emotional and social support to child abuse victims throughout New York City.

The conference is open to the public. A Q&A session will follow the speakers.
RSVP to the event at futurechild@fordham.edu
Facebook.com/FCAFordham | Futurechildadvocates.org

Fordham Coalition Forms to Advocate for Better Understanding of Autism

By Chris Gosier

A coalition of Fordham professors, students, and administrators has come together around the goal of improving the lives of autistic people by changing the way they're treated in American society.

It’s a long-brewing effort that made strides in November 2013 with a conference among Fordham researchers, educators, and representatives of advocacy groups from outside the University. Next up are more conferences, research, and efforts to change policies and attitudes surrounding the capabilities of autistic people and how they can best be helped.

The full article can be read here on Inside Fordham.

Dr. Warren Tryon sets department record for successful dissertations

From left: Dr. Kathleen Schiaffino

Dr. Warren Tryon

Dr. David Glenwick

Dr. Isabel Rodriguez

Dr. David Chabot

On April 30th, 2013, Isabel Rodriguez successfully defended her doctoral dissertation, “ Ethnicity And Age Of Initial Symptom Onset As Predictors Of Neurocognitive Performance And Adaptive Functioning Among Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders”.

 

Dr. Rodriquez was mentored by Dr. Warren Tryon, a (43 years) veteran of the psychology department. She is the 85th successful dissertation student to be mentored by Dr. Tryon, setting a new departmental record.

 

Congratulations to Drs. Tryon and Rodriguez!

Faculty Achievements - Dr. Celia Fisher chairs SRCD policy committee

The Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, or “Common Rule”, provides the basis for Institutional Review Boards, such as the one at Fordham University, to evaluate research involving infants, children, and adolescents.  It was last revised in 1991 in a time when most research was conducted in universities, colleges, and medical institutions and took place at a single site.

Dr. Celia B. Fisher, Ph.D.

The United States Department of Health and Human Services is proposing to update the Common Rule policies in response to ambiguities in the current framework highlighted by the expansion of human subject research into other disciplines and an increase in multi-site studies.  Any changes to these policies would have a significant impact on institutional research in the social and behavioral sciences involving minors.

Dr. Celia Fisher has recently served as the chairperson of a task force convened by the Society for Research and Child Development (SRCD) charged with the creation of a report that ensures that any proposed changes to the “Common Rules” serve the interests of and do not present barriers to the responsible conduct of socio-behavioral research.  The resulting report, “Preserving and Enhancing the Responsible Conduct of Research Involving Children and Youth - A Response to Proposed Changes in Federal Regulations” provides recommendations to policy makers for ensuring the responsible conduct of child and adolescent research in whatever final regulatory changes are enacted.

In this report, Dr. Fisher and her colleagues note that the regulations as currently specified in the “Common Rule” were originally created with biomedical research in mind and that the application of these policies to social and behavioral research has created barriers to conducting research with children and youth.  

The complete report can be obtained from the SRCD web site.
 
Resources

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services - Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects ('Common Rule')

Social Policy Report - “Preserving and Enhancing the Responsible Conduct of Research Involving Children and Youth: A Response to Proposed Changes in Federal Regulations” (PDF)

News Release - HHS announces proposal to improve rules protecting human research subjects

Faculty Achievements - Dr. Fred Wertz

Fred Wertz, Ph.D.

Dr. Fred Wertz was recently elected to the executive board of the American Psychological Association Division 5--Measurement, Statistics, and Evaluation as representative of the Section for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology.

Dr. Wertz has recently published a book on qualitative data analysis entitled, “Five Ways of Doing Qualitative Analysis” (Guilford/2011).

Dr. Wertz is also currently president of the Interdisciplinary Coalition of North American Phenomenologists. In 2014, he is slated to receive the Society for Humanistic Psychology’s Rollo May Award for independent and outstanding pursuits of new frontiers in humanistic psychology.

A selection of Dr. Wertz’s published works can be found listed on his faculty Web page and in Fordham University’s research repository “DigitalResearch@fordham.edu”

Dr. Jay Wade receives Fulbright Senior Research Scholar Award

Dr. Jay Wade of the Fordham University Psychology department has been awarded a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar Award in support of his research project titled “Masculinity, Changing Gender Roles, and Marital and Life Satisfaction Among Indonesian Men.”

Starting this September, Dr. Wade will spend a total of 10 months in Indonesia working on this project.

For more information on Dr. Wade’s Fulbright research project, visit the project’s information page on the psychology department’s Web site.

For information on the Fulbright Scholar Program, see:

http://www.cies.org/about_fulb.htm

Faculty Achievements - Dr. Tiffany Yip

Dr. Tiffany Yip

Dr. Tiffany Yip, current director of the graduate program in Applied Developmental Psychology, has recently joined the Editorial Board of the APA Div 45 Journal "Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology" as an Associate Editor.

She has also been elected as a Fellow of the American Psychological Association to divisions 45 (The Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues) and 7 (Developmental Psychology).

To learn more about Dr. Yip, her research, and her scholarly achievements, visit her faculty Web page.

Dr. Ann Higgins-D’Allessandro publishes “Handbook of Prosocial Education”

Dr. Ann Higgins-D'Allessandro

Dr. Ann Higgins-D'Alessandro has recently published the Handbook of Prosocial Education with Philip Brown, Rutgers, and Michael Corrigan, Marshall University.

She authored Chapter 1:The Second Side of Education, arguing for the necessity of developing shared perspectives and research methods to identify effective teaching across interventions ranging from character and social-emotional learning to mindfulness and diversity education and from democracy and civics to service learning and afterschool programs that promote students' personal and social development that, in turn, supports their academic learning in classrooms, schools, and after school.

Roger Weissberg, NoVo Endowed Chair of Social and Emotional Learning, University of Illinois-Chicago, states that, “Leading scientists and educators' chapters are scholarly, research-based, and practical. This landmark volume will shape education, research, practice, and policy for years to come!”

Dr. Higgins-D’Alessandro is member and former director of the Psychology Department’s Applied Developmental Psychology program.  For more information about her research and scholarly achievements, visit her faculty Web page.

Event recap: Centenarian Study Reception

On November 11th, 2012, Dr. Daniela Jopp of the Applied Developmental Psychology program hosted the Fordham Centenarian Study Reception to honor participants in her two-year study. There were over 70 guests in attendance including 10 centenarians, Fordham administration and faculty, study staff and special guest, Grant Campany of Archon Genomics X PRIZE.

Dr. Daniela Jopp

Fordham Dean of Research Nancy Busch welcomed reception guests and opened the event. Dr. Jopp introduced attending centenarians and gave an overview of preliminary findings of the Fordham Centenarian Study. The study documents the experience of life at age 100 and intends to bring awareness to a growing, but rarely studied population. Dr. Jopp emphasized the challenges centenarians face, for example with respect to health, but stressed that most centenarians who participated in the study indicated to enjoy and value their life. She also highlighted the fact that centenarians have high levels of psychological strengths, such as feeling in control, experiencing life as meaningful, and wanting to live, which helps them to be happy and satisfied and may have contributed to reaching such an advanced age. Mr. Campany presented the 100 Over 100 Competition, noting its significance in learning more about genes that promote longevity and health in centenarians and consequently its imminent impact on healthcare. Two centenarians shared experiences and their take on their own longevity with the audience.

Reception guests enjoyed hearing about Fordham Centenarian Study and getting the chance to meet and learn more about centenarians.

In the future, Dr. Jopp intends to follow up with the study through a project focused on the perspective of the caretakers, children and relatives of the centenarians. She is currently planning on presenting results of the study at the upcoming Gerontological Society of America Conference. Dr. Jopp has recently been featured in Psychology Today and the Financial Times Germany in interviews about her work.

For more information about the Centenarian Study and Dr. Jopp’s other projects, visit the Web page for Dr. Jopp’s Adult Development and Aging Lab.

Celia Fisher Named 2012 AAAS Fellow

Dr. Celia Fisher, Ph.D.

The American Association for the Advancement of Sciences(AAAS) has named Celia Fisher, Ph.D., the Marie Ward Doty University Chair and professor of psychology, as a 2012 AAAS Fellow.

Fisher, who is also the founding director of Fordham's Center for Ethics Education, is one of 702 AAAS members around the world to be named a Fellow for their significant efforts to advance science.

For more detailed information, please visit Fordham Notes.

Dr. Laura Sosinsky elected to CFPC’s Steering Committee

Dr. Laura Stout Sosinsky, Ph.D.

The Applied Developmental Psychology (ADP) program has a leadership role in the national University-Based Child & Family Policy Consortium (CFPC), which includes over 30 member programs and centers across the US.

ADP faculty member Laura Sosinsky has recently been elected to CFPC’s Steering Committee and will help provide input on and support for the direction of CFPC activities and initiatives around research, career development, and engagement with practice and policy.  In addition, she continues to be part of the CFPC leadership group for the Initiative for Evidence-Based Early Childhood Policy and Practice, which will strive to support existing collaboration and generate new interaction among early childhood scientists and policy experts across the country.

Dr. Harold Takooshian represents Fordham as a visiting professor in Moscow

Dr. Harold Takooshian had a busy summer in 2012, representing Fordham University, Psi Chi, and the APA international division as a  visiting Professor in Moscow at the Higher School of Economics (HSE) on social psychology and urban studies.  He also spoke about innovations in higher educationat the HSE Socio-Cultural Research Laboratory, promoting student excellence at the People's Friendship University of Russia, and, along with Anne Takooksian, on advances in I-O psychology at the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Harold thanks the HSE and his many gracious hosts, including Professors Evgeny Osin, Vladimir Stroh, Elena Chebotareva, Alex Voronov, and Valentin Spivakovsky for this superb opportunity to learn more about Russian work and bridge Russian-U.S. psychology.

Dr. Dean Mckay co-editing upcoming book

Recent President-elect of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT)Dr. Dean McKay and colleague, Eric Storch (of University of South Florida), are in the process of co-editing a forthcoming volume that will be published by the American Psychological Association. The book, Obsessive compulsive disorder and its spectrum across the lifespan, is timely by addressing contemporary treatment issues in the forthcoming new DSM-5 category of Obsessive Compulsive Related Disorders.  

Dr. McKay’s research lab, Compulsive, Obsessive, and Anxiety Program , continues to be active in the professional psychology arena.  Some of the lab's recent accomplishments include program graduate Nate Thomas’s recent publication in the American Journal of Psychiatry, entitled, “A quality-based review of randomized controlled trials of cognitive-behavioral therapy for depressions: An assessment and meta-regression.”  Many current lab members will be presenting posters at the upcoming ABCT conference and have also published papers in peer-reviewed journals with Dr. McKay.  

Dr. Wallace awarded Carolyn Payton Early Career Award

Fordham alumnus, Dr. Scyatta A. Wallace, was recently honored with the Carolyn Payton Early Career Award from APA. Dr. Wallace received her PhD in Applied Developmental Psychology in 2002 from Fordham University, where she specialized in child and adolescent health. Upon graduation, she completed a research fellowship at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, GA where she worked on domestic and international HIV/AIDS programs. Dr. Wallace’s current research focuses on the influence of neighborhood context and sociocultural norms on HIV risk among urban Black youth.  Her work also includes the design and implementation of gender specific and culturally-tailored interventions to promote health and health care utilization among Black youth.   In addition, she is interested in the promotion of community consultation as a tool for addressing ethical concerns in behavioral and mental health research with vulnerable populations.  Dr. Wallace is currently a professor of Psychology at St. John’s University in Queens, NY.  The Fordham psychology department is proud to congratulate Dr. Wallace on her accomplishments!

2012 Anastasi Lecture Series set for October 23rd

The upcoming 2012 Anastasi Lecture Series talk is entitled, "The More Who Die, the Less We Care: The Arithmetic of Compassion." Paul Slovic, Ph.D., the founder and president of Decision Research, has been invited to address the Fordham community on this intriguing topic. The focus of his will be on why good people and their governments have repeatedly ignored mass murder and genocide. Dr. Slovic is a former president of the Society for Risk Analysis and has received a number of prestigious awards for his work in human judgment, decision making and risk analysis.

Please see the Anastasi Lecture Series webpage for more information related to this upcoming event

Dr. Jopp's Centenarian Research Gains Media Attention

Dr. Daniela Jopp spearheads the Fordham Centenarian Study.  The research program investigates the specifics of life at age 100 - how well are centenarians doing, what are the difficulties that they face in everyday life, activities they like to engage in, and how satisfied are they with their lives.  A central aim of the research is investigating psychological factors that enable these very old individuals to handle everyday challenges in a positive way.

Dr. Jopp and the Fordham Centenarian Study have been featured recently on Web MD.  Jopp was quoted about her recent research findings, stating, "We Know personality has a strong genetic background...[Those who live to 100] seem to have a very special psychological makeup."  Read the full article on WebMD.

Dr. Jopp was also interviewed by CBS New York, watch the full feature on centenarians and Dr. Jopp's important research: Super-Agers: Genetic or Good Attitude?