News

Professor Lisa Oakes received the UC Davis Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research. Professor Oakes was nominated for this prestigious award by current and former students in her Infant Cognition Lab. The award recognizes dedication to excellence in research and exemplary mentoring of undergraduate research projects. Undergraduate students mentored by Professor Oakes routinely present their research findings at the annual UC Davis Undergraduate Research Conference. 

In "Why We Remember," Professor Charan Ranganath radically reframes the way we think about memory. Combining accessible language with cutting-edge research, he reveals the surprising ways our brains record the past and how we use that information to understand who we are in the present, and to imagine and plan for the future.

Alison Ledgerwood was selected as the most recent recipient of The Society for Personality and Social Psychology's (SPSP's) Award for Distinguished Service to the Society. The award "recognizes distinguished service specifically to SPSP. Distinguished service may be in terms of a particular, significant activity that benefited the Society or cumulative contributions, performed over time, to the Society.

Professor Brian Trainor, former graduate student Emily Wright, Ph.D. (shown in photo), and their collaborators report exciting new findings that testosterone is a key hormone that drives gender-based differences in responses to social stress in mice, in a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The study encompassed six separate experiments with mice to isolate what changes in the brain drive these differences between males and females.

Professor Simona Ghetti was elected as a fellow of the Society for Experimental Psychology: https://www.sepsych.org/fellows/.

The most recent U.S. News and World Report rankings place UC Davis #6 among public universities and #11 among undergraduate Psychology programs in the nation. For details, please read the press release: https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/uc-davis-rises-6th-among-nations-top-public-universities

Distinguished Professor Emeritus Dean Keith Simonton has been honored with the 2024 Ernest R. Hilgard Lifetime Achievement Award, bestowed by the Society for General Psychology, Division 1 of the American Psychological Association. He thus joins such past recipients as Daniel Kahneman, Janet Shibley Hyde, Philip Zimbardo, Florence L. Denmark, Scott Lilienfeld, Morton Ann Gernsbacher, Robert J. Sternberg, Linda Bartoshuk, Paul Rozin, Nora Newcombe, Gregory A. Kimble, and Hilgard himself, the inaugural honoree.

Professor Ross Thompson has been selected to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award from "Zero to Three", a national nonprofit organization devoted to the healthy development of young children and their families. Professor Thompson is a distinguished professor of Psychology and author of the recent book "The Brain Development Revolution: Science, the Media, and Public Policy" published by Cambridge University Press.

Professor Gail Goodman was selected to receive the 2024 American Psychological Association Division 7 (Developmental Psychology) Mentor Award. The Developmental Psychology Mentor Award honors "individuals who have contributed to developmental psychology through the education and training of the next generation of research leaders in developmental psychology. Our interest is in recognizing individuals who have had substantial impact on the field of developmental psychology by their mentoring of young scholars."

Distinguished Emeritus Professor Phillip Shaver was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Established in 1780, the academy “honors excellence and convenes leaders from every field of human endeavor to examine new ideas, address issues of importance to the nation and the world, and work together to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, honor, dignity, and happiness of a free, independent, and virtuous people.”

Professor Fernanda Ferreira was chosen to receive the Psychonomic Society’s Clifford T. Morgan Distinguished Leadership Award. The award recognizes her outstanding contributions to the field of scientific psychology as well as her sustained leadership and service to the discipline. The award is accompanied by a $1,000 USD prize.

Mosley is an Assistant Professor of Racial Inequality in the Psychology Department at UC Davis. Her research focuses on how group members navigate their social identities and their worlds, and relate to other groups. She studies how people think about, respond to, and engage in acts of cultural appropriation, or acts of out-group cultural use. In 2020, she received her doctoral degree at the University of Kansas as a member of Monica Biernat's Stereotyping and Judgement Lab.

We are pleased to announce that the UC Davis Department of Psychology was ranked 12th in the country (tied for 6th among Public Universities) by U.S. News and World Report. The new rankings reflect the growing recognition and positive overall reputation of our department, previously ranked #26 four years prior. The rankings also provide subdiscipline rankings: for Developmental Psychology, our department was ranked 9th overall (7th among public universities).

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Although treatments for depression are available, existing treatments are not effective for many who use them. Furthermore, rates of depression are higher in women than in men, yet the cause for this difference is unknown, making their illnesses, at times, more complicated to treat.