Our research is focused on the mechanisms by which the body temperature of endothermic mammals is regulated. These include both behavioral and autonomic processes. Thermal stimuli in the environment, which perturb the body's thermal homeostasis, are of particular significance. Prior research on conventional radiant and convective thermal stressors stimulated our current interest in the effects of radiofrequency and microwave radiation on thermoregulatory processes. We have determined the microwave (2450 MHz and 450 MHz radiation) thresholds for the alteration of thermoregulatory behavior in nonhuman primates. We have determined tolerance levels of experimental animals exposed to microwave fields at both frequencies in cold, thermoneutral and warm environments. Our current studies feature pulsed as well as continuous wave fields and evaluation of microwave exposure in febrile animals. A computerized mathematical model of the human thermoregulatory system allows us to introduce the results of our animal experiments to predict the thermoregulatory sequelae of exposure to radiofrequency and microwave radiation in humans. For example, we can predict the tolerance of human patients to radiofrequency radiation during clinical magnetic resonance imaging. Other current studies evaluate human perception of radiofrequency fields with classical psychophysical methods and assess autonomic thermoregulatory responses in human subjects exposed to low-level microwave fields.

Adair, E. R. & Berglund, L.G. (1992). Predicted thermophysiological responses of humans to MRI fields. Annuals of the New York Academy of Science, 649, 188-200.

Adair, E. R., Adams, B. W. & Hartman, S. K. (1992). Physiological interaction processes and radiofrequency energy absorption. Bioelectromagnetics, 13, 497-512.

My laboratory is interested in the study of electrical and metabolic activity of the human brain. We are currently involved in three areas of research: localization of sensorimotor and language-related function prior to neurosurgery; investigation of neuronal events associated with cognitive processes; investigation of sensorimotor and cognitive processes using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). My current interests include: intracranial recordings in patients being evaluated for epilepsy surgery as means of studying extrastriate cortex involved in the perception of faces, words, numbers, and color; fMRI studies of sensorimotor and extrastriate visual function.

Allison, T., Ginter, H., McCarthy, G., Nobre, A. C., Puce, A., Luby, M. & Spencer, D. D. (1994). Face recognition in human extrastriate cortex. Journal of Neurophysiology, 71, 821-825.

Puce, A., Allison, T., Asgari, M., Gore, J.C., McCarthy, G. (1996). Differential sensitivity of human visual cortex to faces, letterstrings, and textures: A functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Journal of Neuroscience, 16, 5205-5215.

Ph.D., 1969, Mass. Institute of Technology

My research focuses on the ways in which an understanding of the structure of language can contribute to a broader study of the structure of the mind. Within the technical literature of linguistics, I have devoted most of my attention to a theory of morphology (the structure of words) that emphasizes knowledge of relations among words as opposed to a mere inventory of minimal units (morphemes). I am presently working on a book on the nature of communication in animals, and its relation to the cognitive abilities underlying human language. A recent book with David Lightfoot ("The Language Organ: Linguistics as Cognitive Physiology") makes the broader case for the study of language as a form of knowledge based on specific properties of human biology. Stephen Anderson's Homepage

Anderson, Stephen R., and David Lightfoot (2000). "The Human Language Faculty as an Organ." to appear in Annual Review of Physiology, vol. 62.

Anderson, Stephen R. (1999). "An A-Morphous Account of Tagalog Second Position Clitics." first version read at Colloque de linguistique: La cliticisation, Bordeaux, France, 24 September, 1998. Later version read at Annual Meeting of Linguistic Society of America, Los Angeles, January, 1999.

Ph.D., Univ. California San Diego 1981

My research investigates the contributions of monoamines to higher cognitive function, with the ultimate aim of better understanding and treating human cognitive disorders. Much of my research has focused on the memory and attention functions of the prefrontal cortex (PFC), as this region appears very susceptible to its neurochemical environment, and PFC cognitive deficits are prominent in many cognitive disorders, including Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, schizophrenia, and age-related cognitive decline.

Ph.D., MIT 1996

Areas of interests: Syntactic theory, first language acquisition, sentence processing, Slavic and East Asian linguistics.

Research interests: Syntactic theory: argument structure, aspect, and unaccusativity diagnostics; optionality within the minimalist framework of grammar; the interaction of obligatory movement operations and discourse/interpretation.

First language acquisition: verbal and nominal inflections and the corresponding functional projections in early grammars; maturation of argument structure, UTAH, and movement operations; acquisition of Russian.

Sentence processing: the processing complexity of unambiguous center-embedded structures; the role of nominal morphology in sentence processing; the mechanisms of reanalysis; the processing of head-final structures.

Slavic and East Asian languages: unaccusativity diagnostics in free word order languages; genitive of negation; the syntactic and discourse properties of scrambling operations; cross-linguistic variation in the availability of certain semantic classes of verbs.

Our research interests center around the sense of taste. We are interested both in clinical taste disorders and in the genetic variations in taste abilities that make us occupy different taste worlds. Clinical problems encountered in the taste system are of two sorts: phantom tastes that cannot be abolished and taste losses. Our aim is to find ways to apply state-of-the-art psychophysical procedures to the measurement of these abnormalities. We are especially interested in groups with food problems including elderly individuals and those with bulimia. Our investigations into genetic variation show that bitter and sweet substances in particular do not taste the same to everyone. For example, saccharin tastes bitter only to some individuals while others taste it as pure sweet. Sucrose is sweet to everyone but the degree of sweetness varies. Individuals that find saccharin to be bitter also taste sucrose to be nearly twice as sweet as other substances which taste bitter to some people. We are interested in whether or not this genetic characteristic can help explain the lack of preference for milk products in some children.

Bartoshuk, L. M., Rifkin, B., Marks, L. E., & Bars, P. (1986). Taste and aging. Journal of Gerontology, 41, 51-57.

Bartoshuk, L. M. (1979). Bitter taste of saccharin related to the genetic ability to taste the bitter substance 6-n-Propylthiouracil. Science, 205, 934-935.

The study of cognitive-affective structures (mental representation or cognitive schema), particularly concepts of the self and of others -- how they develop normally, how they are differentially impaired in various types of psychopathology, and how they change during the psychotherapeutic process. I study mental representations through a number of different techniques, including responses to ambiguous or partially ambiguous stimuli such as ink blots and TAT cards, and as they are expressed in dreams and the spontaneous descriptions of self and significant others. A number of newly developed conceptual systems are used to analyze the content and cognitive organization of mental representations and in investigating their relationships to dimensions in normal development, psychopathology, and change in the therapeutic process.

Blatt, S. J. (1995). Representational structures in psychopathology. In D. Cicchetti & S. Toth (Eds.), Rochester symposium on developmental psychopathology, Volume VI: Emotion, cognition, and presentation (pp. 1-33). Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press.

Blatt, S. J., Auerbach, J. S., & Levy, K. N. (1997). Mental representations in personality development, psychopathology, and the therapeutic process. Review of General Psychology, 1, 351-374.

Professor Dhar is an expert in consumer behavior and branding, marketing management and marketing strategy. His research involves using psychological and economic principles to investigate fundamental aspects about the manner in which preferences are formed and constructed in order to understand and predict consumer behavior in the marketplace. He is also interested in the processes of self-regulation and, in specific, in the simultaneous pursuit of multiple goals. In real-life situations, people hold several different, even conflicting goals that they intend to pursue (e.g., enjoy different culinary delights while also wanting a slim figure, pursuing career objectives while also wanting to spend time with family and friends). His ongoing research explores the regulation of multiple goals in multiple goal systems.

Selected Articles
"Licensing Effect in Consumer Choice," (with U. Khan), Journal of Marketing Research, forthcoming

"The Effects of Goal Fulfillment on Risk Preferences in Sequential Choice," (with N. Novemsky), Journal of Consumer Research, 2005

My major theoretical goal is to develop integrated and compatible theories of speech perception, speech production and linguistic phonology. The research on speech perception investigates how listeners recover phonological segments (consonants and vowels) from a speech signal in which information for segments is thoroughly overlapped and context-sensitive. The research on production is aimed at discovering the coordinations among speech articulators that permit literal production of consonants and vowels in the vocal tract despite the temporal overlap among them that gives rise to context-sensitivity in the acoustic speech signal. The study of phonology is meant to discover ways of understanding linguistic "competence" so that its primitive components have only characteristics that are implementable in the vocal tract.

In a different line of research, I am investigating ways in which language performance reflects the changing base of knowledge shared between talker and listener. We are finding that at many levels of language (phonetic, lexical, syntactic) talkers reduce forms as shared knowledge grows. That is, talkers supply less information where less is needed; accordingly, when information is already foregrounded for the listener words are short durationally, lexically shorter words or phrases are used to refer and some optional syntactic markers may be omitted. We find that the patterning of reductions and elaborations itself marks episode units in a narration, and thus may provide useful information to a listener about discourse structure.

Fowler, C. A. & Levy, E. T. (1996). Talker-listener attunements to speech events. Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues, 6, 305-328.

Fowler, C. A. (1996). Listeners do hear sounds not tongues. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 99, 1730-1741.

My colleagues and I at Haskins Laboratories are currently developing a computational model of speech production, using principles from dynamical systems theory. We base our model on a particular approach called task dynamics, which abstractly characterizes phonetically-relevant "gestures" as coordinated movements of individual vocal tract articulators, harnessed to achieve a particular phonetic task. The computational model generates patterns of movement of simulated vocal tract articulators, from a "gestural score" that specifies the temporal relations among dynamically defined gestures. From the movements of these model articulators, a time-varying vocal tract filter function is calculated, and an acoustic waveform is produced, that we can listen to. Our research involves analyzing articulatory movements produced by speakers of English to derive the abstract dynamical parameters of the gestural score. The output of the model is then tested in perceptual experiments. This articulatory dynamic model of speech production can provide the basis for a concise and principled description of variability of speech associated with changes in stress, speaking rate redundancy, and phonetic context. Because it can model speech variability from an invariant underlying structure in a principled way, we are also beginning to use the model as a basis for automatic speech recognition, by developing procedures for recovering the gestural score from the acoustic signal.

Browman, C. P., & Goldstein, L. (1990). Tiers in articulatory phonology, with some implications for casual speech. In J. Kingston & M.E. Beckman (Eds.), Laboratory phonology I: Between the grammar and the physics of speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Browman, C., & Goldstein, L. (1992). Articulatory phonology: An overview. Phonetica, 49, 155-180.

My central intellectual interest is self-interested motivation. I seek to understand the social, psychological, and political conditions under which self-interest manifests itself in attitudes and behavior. This interest has impelled me to study a disparate array of phenomena, ranging form whites' resistance to court-ordered school desegregation to House incumbents' propensity to raise and spend campaign money. Indeed, my current research (with Robert Abelson) on hate crime can be understood as an attempt to analyze a form of behavior that seems quite distant from instrumental motives.

The large empirical literature on self-interest is marred by conceptually ragged and methodologically flawed research. Much of my time is spent, therefore, addressing what I see as the methodological limitations of past work. In this vein, I recently co-authored a book entitled Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory (Yale University Press, 1994), which takes on several large literatures in political science and sociology that purport to demonstrate the virtues of economic models of human behavior.

Green, D. P. (1992). The price elasticity of mass preferences. American Political Science Review, 86, 128-148.

Green, D. P., & Cowden, J. A. (1992). Who protests: Self-interest and white opposition to busing. Journal of Politics, 54, 471-496.

My interest in child development is centered on issues concerning the etiology of the emerging individuality of the child, in particular, on developmental forces contributing to the rise of pronounced individual differences in cognitive and behavioral-emotional functioning. The contextual framework of my research is that of the developmental niche. I define developmental niche as the most elementary unit that forms an indivisible contextual structure for child development and conceptualize it in terms of five major subsystems that function together as a larger system. The five components are (1) the physical setting in which the child grows; (2) the cultural, societal, and social settings in which the child lives; (3) customs of child care; and (4) the bio-psychological profiles (sets of individual biological and psychological characteristics) of the child; and (5) of the caregiver.

Currently my research is progressing in three directions: (1) understanding the role of the biological make-up of the child and his/her parents in the child's development (specifically, my work on specific reading disability and autism); (2) understanding the impact of large-scale societal changes on child development (specifically, my work on the adaptive and maladaptive behaviors of Russian youth); and (3) understanding the role of the physical setting in which the child grows (my research investigating the impact of the Chernobyl catastrophe's aftermath on the developmental pathways of the children affected by the explosion). What holds these seemingly diverse strands of research together is my integration of them as studies at different structural levels of the developmental niche. I seek to study the developmental niche as a holistic complex system rather than as mere isolated components.

I research the psychology of concepts and categorization. The way in which people understand the world by classifying objects, people, events or situations into different conceptual types or categories is a fundamental topic for cognitive science. Concepts are the basic building blocks of thoughts and ideas, and play a major part in determining the meaning of substantive words in any language.

My main research interests focus on increasing understanding of the determinants and consequences of health behaviors and health outcomes. My current research has been directed toward a series of community-based, longitudinal studies in the realm of HIV/AIDS. My research team and I have been actively involved in several ongoing studies, including: (1) identifying factors that influence recruitment, adherence and retention in AIDS clinical trails; (2) identifying the behavioral and psychological consequences of HIV counseling and testing for women; (3) diasaggregating the effects of race and social class on access to health care, health behaviors and health outcomes; and (4) other studies examining prevention interventions, high-risk sexual behavior, access to health care, and health outcomes for persons with HIV.

A new area within health psychology that we are beginning to develop is the study of "psychological resilience." We define resilience as the effective mobilization of individual and social resources in response to a health challenge. We will begin to explore the study of resilience theoretically, methodologically and empirically in the area of HIV disease as well as other health threats.

Additional interests include public policy and medical education reform. Having spent five years in Washington DC (and working on Capital Hill), I have an interest in the use of social science to inform public policy. For example, access to health care and inclusion in health research--particularly among those traditionally under-represented (such as women and minorities)--is an important area for further study and policy formulation.

Finally, I am currently developing medical school curricula to integrate social and behavioral sciences into medical education at Yale.

Rodin, J., & Ickovics, J. R. (1990). Women's health: Review and research agenda as we approach the 21st Century. American Psychologist, 45, 1018-1034.

Ickovics, J. R., Morrill, A. C., Beren, S.E., Walsh, U. , & Rodin, J. (1994). Limited effects of HIV counseling and testing for women: A prospective study of behavioral and psychological consequences. Journal of the American Medical Association, 272, 443-448.

My interests are broadly in the area of health psychology and behavioral medicine. I am particularly interested in the integration of neurobiological and psychosocial models of the experience of chronic illness and associated disability and affective distress. I am also increasingly interested in the roles of the family and broader social context, as well as the role of social cognition, in the process of adaptation to chronic illness. An ongoing program of research focuses on the experience of chronic pain, with specific projects designed to evaluate predictors of outcome of psychological treatments, the relationship between pain and depression, pain-relevant social responding in the maintenance of pain and disability, and negative cognition and pain intensity. A second line of ongoing research focuses on the identification of affective distress and health risk behaviors in primary care medical settings and associations between these variables and medical outcomes and use of the health care system.

Banks, S. M., & Kerns, R .D. (1996). Explaining high rates of depression in chronic pain: A diathesis-stress framework. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 95-110.

Bastone, E., & Kerns, R. D. (1996). The effects of self-efficacy and perceived social support on recovery post-CABG surgery. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 17, 324-330.

James Leckman, Ph.D.

My primary interest is in the interaction of genes and environment in the development of the human CNS. I am also interested in patients and families with Tourette's Syndrome and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. Research on these disorders range from phenomenology, to neurobiology to genetics, to risk factor research and treatment studies. Other interests include the application of Darwinian principles of evolution to the study of psychpathology.

Becca Levy, Ph.D.

Professor Levy's research explores psychosocial influences on aging. Her studies focus on how psychological factors, particularly older individuals' perceptions of aging, affect cognition and health in old age. She studies this by examining: 1) how the aging process differs in cultures that hold diverse views of aging; and 2) how a psychosocial intervention, designed to trigger either positive or negative perceptions of aging, influences a variety of outcomes in older individuals including memory, physical performance and cardiovascular response to stress. In addition, Professor Levy examines how psychosocial factors influence recovery and survival in old age.

My main interest centers on human sensory and perceptual processes. The approach is largely psychophysical, seeking to learn how the senses select, modify, modulate, and in general transform patterns of impinging stimulus energies and information and how implicit knowledge about sensory/perceptual experience is expressed in language.

Guiding much of this research is the perspective that I call "the unity of the senses": Although the senses of vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell are specialized to respond to different kinds of stimuli and to provide differential information, nevertheless the senses also reveal profound similarities and interconnections. A main goal of the research is to uncover and elucidate general, "unitary" principles of perceptual processing, and to relate perceptual to higher-level cognitive processing. Current research is examining: mechanisms of attention to sensory stimuli, effects of context on perception, and interactions of perceptual and semantic codes in processing information.

Marks, L. E., & Armstrong, L. (1996). Haptic and visual representations of space. In T .Inui and J. L. McClelland (Eds.), Attention and performance XVI (pp. 263-287). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Marks, L. E., & Wheeler, M. E. (1998). Attention and the detectability of weak taste stimuli. Chemical Senses, 23, 19-29.

My research examines information processing and attentional processes in infants. Employing visual habituation procedures between 3 and 6 months and older, I am studying the effects of prenatal cocaine exposure on the development of attentional regulatory capacities. Additionally, our research program in the behavioral teratology of cocaine is studying the effects of maternal cocaine abuse on an adult's capacity to parent a child and the contribution of maternal interactions to the child's attentional capacities. Cocaine abuse influences infant development on potentially multiple levels including (1) effects on fetal brain development, (2) effects on maternal health during pregnancy and placental function, (3) the effects of cocaine use on specific parenting behaviors and more general effects mediated through increased violence, multiple foster placements, homelessness, and repeated family disruption, and (4) parental psychopathology or neuropsychiatric disorders that predate cocaine abuse (e.g., depression, attention deficit disorder) which carries both interactive and genetic risks for the child. These different levels of effect also highlight prenatal cocaine exposure as an appropriate model for studying biologic-environment interactions.

Mayes, L. C., Graner, R. H., Bornstein, M. H., & Zuckerman, B. (1992), The problem of intrauterine cocaine exposure. Journal of the American Medical Association, 267, 406-408.

Mayes, L. D. (1992). The effects of prenatal cocaine exposure on young children's development. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 521, 11-27.

Professor Merikangas's major research interest is the genetic epidemiology of psychiatric and neurological disorders. The central themes of her research are identification of familial patterns of disorders in adults and children. The key features of the work are (1) inclusion of a broad spectrum of conditions including affective disorders, anxiety disorders, alcoholism, drug abuse, migraine, and stroke, and their interrelationships; (2) application of diverse study designs within the purview of epidemiology and population genetics including epidemiologic surveys, prospective longitudinal cohort studies, studies of high-risk children, studies of nuclear and extended families including twins and half siblings, and migrant studies; and (3) application of a multidisciplinary approach to identify individuals with enhanced vulnerability to serve as targets for prevention and intervention efforts. [from http://www.med.yale.edu/eph/html/faculty_members/merikangas.html]


Merikangas, K.R., Dierker, L., and Szatmari, P. Psychopathology among offspring of parents with substance abuse and /or anxiety: a high risk study. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 39: 711-720, 1998.

Merikangas, K.R., Stevens, D.E., Fenton, B., O'Malley, S., Woods, S., Stolar, M., and Risch, N. Co-morbidity and familial aggregation of alcoholism and anxiety disorders. Psychology Medicine 28: 773-788, 1998.

Professor Novemsky's research focuses on how consumers evaluate and use different types of information in situations where multiple pieces of information are available. He investigates what types of information consumers find easy to evaluate and readily use in deciding how much they are willing to pay for various products. He has also looked at what information consumers use to form an aggregate judgment of the enjoyment of an experience. He was a visiting scholar at Wharton's Decision Processes Center.

My research is focused on the genetics of abnormal behavior. In addition, studies have recently been initiated that are designed to examine the relative contribution of genetic and non-genetic (environmental) factors in the development of behavioral disorders in children and adults. My laboratory employs a number of different research paradigms to examine the role of genetic factors in the manifestation of behavior. Research paradigms include family, twin and prospective longitudinal studies designed to examine hypotheses of genetic and non-genetic transmission and molecular genetic paradigms designed to identify regions of the human genome where susceptibility genes might be located.

Pauls, D. L., Alsobrook, J. P. II, Goodman, W., Rasmussen, S., & Leckman, J. F. (1995). A family study of obsessive compulsive disorder. American Journal of Psychiatry, 152, 76-84.

Pauls, D. L., Ott, J., Paul, S.M., Allen C.R., Fann, S.C.J., Carlulli, J.P., Falls, K.M., Bouthillier, C.A., Gravius, T.C., Keith, T.P., Egeland, J. A., & Ginns, E. I. (1995). Linkage analyses of chromosome 18 markers and bipolar affective disorder in the Old Order Amish. American Journal of Human Genetics, 57, 636-643.

I am interested in how the process of integration of different linguistic information during comprehension in real-time occurs (focusing on the integration of semantic and syntactic information), and whether differences in the process of integration (i.e., differences in time-course of activation) find parallels in cortical realization and distribution. I am interested as well in the characterization of language deficits that result from brain damage, and in the interaction between linguistic processes and other cognitive capacities such as memory. To this end, I use evidence from language deficits (aphasia), real-time processing and imaging techniques (in particular fMRI). The phenomena I focus on fall roughly within the confines of the syntax-lexico-semantic connection (both from the representational and processing perspective). This includes the characterization of the correspondence between argument structure and syntactic representation, establishing the connection in processing terms between the lexicon and syntactic representation, and determining the time-course of activation of syntactically opaque semantic combinatorial operations.

My research interests include the following: Schizophrenia and psychosis: Assessment of cognitive deficits and disordered thinking; evaluation of contact/attachment with significant others; family patterns; differential diagnosis and course of illness. 
Depression: Evaluation of differences in experience of depression; measurement of interpersonal and goal-directed functioning and attitudes, quality of representation of significant others. Cognitive/structural development: Relationship of Kohlberg's Moral Development and Loevinger's Ego Development to psychopathology and personality.

Blatt, S. J., D'Afflitti, J.P. & Quinlan, D. M. (1976). Experiences of depression in normal young adults. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 85, 383-389. 

Harrow, M. & Quinlan, D. M. (1985). Disordered thinking and schizophrenic psychopathology. New York: Gardiner Press. 

Dr. Schwab-Stone's research is in the Epidemiology of childhood disorders and the role of schools in relation the mental health of children. She is involved in setting policy for the schools in relation to mental health and curricular issues.

Dr. Sikkema's research is focused on the development of HIV-related mental health and coping interventions. She is the Principal Investigator of two studies evaluating group interventions for men and women with HIV, one for those who are also experiencing AIDS-related bereavement and the other for individuals with traumatic stress due to sexual abuse. Her research is supported by the National Institute of Mental Health.

Dr. Sikkema also conducts research on the development and evaluation of HIV risk behavior change interventions, with expertise in community-level interventions. She has served as the Principal Investigator of two multi-site community level interventions, one undertaken with women and the other with adolescents living in low-income housing developments in geographically diverse U.S. cities. Dr. Sikkema is currently the P.I. of two prevention intervention studies, one with abused women in South Africa and the other among formerly homeless with severe mental illness currently living in transitional housing programs.

Dr. Sikkema is the Director of CIRA's Community Research Core, and Director of HIV Prevention and Mental Health Research at The Consultation Center, a major research and service organization based in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University School of Medicine.

My research focuses on the developmental psychopathology of early childhood. Disorders of special interest include autism, mental retardation, and developmental language disorders and other disorders of early childhood onset. A specific focus of this research has been on aspects of diagnosis and phenomenology in relation to social development and in relation to continuities and discontinuities in syndrome expression over the course of development. Several different research strategies have been utilized. Time-sample techniques have been used to study aspects of behavioral expression of disorder in relation to the social environment, e.g. gaze deviance in autism. Another line of research has focused on developing techniques for assessing social deficit and deviance in relation to syndrome expression and syndrome definition. Studies of diagnosis and phenomenology have also evaluated categorical and dimensional approaches to diagnosis in these disorders. A central theme of this research has been the attempt to understand how early patterns of social deviance become entrained in subsequent development.

Volkmar, F. R. (Ed.). 1996. Psychoses and Persuasive Developmental Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence.

Cohen, D. J. & Volkmar, F.R. (Ed.). 1997. Handbook of Autism. New York: Wiley

My research concerns the impact of leadership styles on the performance of complex organizations. We are interested primarily in the role of leaders in the decision-making process. A taxonomy of alternatives has been developed varying in the amount of participation afforded subordinates in the making of decision. This taxonomy is an integral part of two research programs. The first program is aimed at the consequences of various amounts of participation for such outcomes as the quality of decisions reached, the degree of commitment to decisions, the time taken and the development of subordinates. This research supports a contingency view of leadership and in fact has lead to the development of a prescriptive model which can take the form of a computer based expert system.

The second research program examines the extent to which leaders do in fact involve subordinates in decision-making including the joint effects of situational variables and individual differences. An integral part of this activity has been the development of a computer based technology for assessing a leader's style including the decision rules that he or she employs in deciding when and where to involve others. A current interest is the degree to which these decision rules can be modified through training.

Vroom, V. H., & Jago, A. (1988). The new leadership: Managing participation in organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Vroom, V. H., & Deci, E. L. (Eds), (1992). Management and motivation. London, England: Penguin Books.

My research is guided by two main questions. First, does psychotherapy for youth "work," in the settings and samples of real world clinical care? To date, there have been over 1500 controlled investigations of youth psychotherapy. Results of these studies tell a consistent story -- we can produce substantial changes in youths’ psychiatric symptoms, with treatment effect sizes in the moderate to large range. This would appear to be good news for the families of the 2.5 million youth seeking mental health services each year and for the public and private organizations charged with their care. However, while we have copious evidence that interventions for youth can work well in the laboratory (i.e., are efficacious), we have very little information about whether treatments for youth do work well in practice (i.e., are effective).

To begin addressing this knowledge gap, I have engaged in research (1) defining the models of treatment used in community mental health care, (2) testing the effectiveness of these community therapies for depressed and anxious youth, and (3) assessing the outcomes of experimental, evidence-based psychotherapies (e.g., cognitive-behavioral therapy [CBT]) under conditions approximating real world clinical service. These studies have revealed that: (1) the outcomes of community mental health care for youth depression and anxiety may not exceed the natural remission rates for these disorders, and (2) it may be possible to improve treatment outcomes by exporting CBT interventions from research settings into active clinical practice. The majority of my current research focuses on this last goal -- developing, disseminating, and evaluating "practice friendly" CBT interventions in the settings and samples of clinical practice.

My second research question is more basic in nature: When psychotherapy for youth works, by what mechanisms does it achieve its effects? I have recently become interested in behavioral mediators of CBT for youth depression (e.g., engagement in pleasant and meaningful activities) and attentional processes in exposure therapy for youth anxiety. I view my interest in treatment mechanism as complementary to my work in treatment effectiveness. By understanding the basic mechanisms and core components of therapy, it should be possible to craft more effective and efficient interventions for youth, with a higher likelihood of success in practice.

Weersing, V. R., & Weisz, J. R. (2002). Community clinic treatment of depressed youth: Benchmarking usual care against CBT clinical trials. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 70, 299-310.

Weersing, V. R., & Weisz, J. R. (2002). Mechanisms of action in youth psychotherapy. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 43, 3-29.