Psychological Well-Being in Young Adulthood and Midlife.
Dr. Burcu Demiray, a recent graduate of the Department of Psychology, Development Area, is the 2011 recipient of the Gerontological Society of America’s Behavioral and Social Sciences Dissertation Award. This national award is presented to the doctoral student in behavioral and social sciences whose dissertation excels in contributing to the literature on adult development and aging. Award criteria include that the dissertation is original and creative, is clearly theoretically grounded, and provides a high quality empirical review of the literature. Dr. Demiray’s winning paper, “Time Since Birth and Time Left to Live: Future Time Perspective and Psychological Well-Being in Young Adulthood and Midlife” shows that a person’s chronological age and their perception of future time left to live are opposing forces influencing their current psychological well-being. Middle-aged individuals showed higher levels of various types of well-being (e.g., self-acceptance, autonomy) than young adults. The findings suggest that in late midlife, people can optimize psychological well-being to the extent that they maintain a positive, open-ended sense of the future. Those in young adulthood also gain psychological well-being from their general tendency to view the future as open-ended and full of possibility, but their actual chronological age acts as a disadvantage for well-being. Burcu Demiray is originally from Istanbul, Turkey and was mentored as an international PhD student in Dr. Susan Bluck’s Life Story Lab. She is now a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her program of research is grounded in life span developmental psychology with a focus on goal-orientation and social-cognitive approaches to autobiographical memory across adulthood. Gregory D. WebsterCan Uniform Color Color Aggression?Professor of Psychology
In a scholarly paper recently published online, a research team led by University of Florida psychologist Gregory D. Webster analyzed 25 years of penalty-minute data from the National Hockey League and found a correlation between one-ice aggression (assessed by referees) and players' uniform (jersey) colors. “When teams wore black jerseys, they were penalized more than when they did not,” they write in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. “When teams switched to wearing colored jerseys at home games, they were penalized more than when they wore white jerseys at home games.” The authors conclude that, “Collectively, these quasi-experimental findings suggest that black jerseys are associated with more aggression, and that white jerseys are associated with less.” Nevertheless, Webster and his colleagues caution that, "Whether the color-aggression effects are due to the uniform wearer, the opposing player, the referee, or all three, remains an open question.” UF Psychology graduate student Mike Parent wins 3 APA awards.
Generous gift rescues lab course
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The Department of Psychology is hiring two faculty positions, one in Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience and the other in Social.
UF Psychology graduate student Mike Parent won the division 17 section for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender issues award, the division 17 supervision and training publication of the year award, and the division 51, psychology of men and masculinity, student of the year award. These awards are for his work on men's issues and professional training in psychology, and will be awarded in August at the anual convention held in Washington DC.
A long-standing laboratory course, EAB 4022, Laboratory Procedures in Behavior Analysis, continues to be offered by the Psychology Department, thanks to the generosity of Karl Zurn, Chief Executive Officer of Med Associates, Inc. and Florida Research Instruments, Inc. The laboratory course was in jeopardy because the control equipment was sorely out of date, and our information-technology team informed us that the equipment could no longer be supported. To provide a clear indicator of the nature of the circumstances, the systems were controlled using computers from the pre-PCI-card era, operating under Windows 95! To remedy the situation, Mr. Zurn donated five Med Associates (Model DIG-703B) interface units. These are USB based and therefore were easily mated with available, modern computers. The units can monitor eight inputs and operate 16 outputs, and they have a self-contained power supply that is used to provide power to the unit and also to the experimental test chambers. They permit us to arrange a very wide range of experimental procedures. Mr. Zurn also donated the requisite software, MedPC-IV®, that permits state-of-the-art programming control and data collection. Given our history of getting the most out of equipment, we should be in good shape, equipment-wise for the next decade, at least.