April Fool's is behind us and spring is here (hello April showers)! As we embark on the home stretch of the semester and academic year, please read about the latest accomplishments of our graduate students. Many new publications, grant submissions, awards, and other exciting developments!

New Publications

• Dedhe, A., Chowkase, A. A., Gogate, N., Naphade, A., Naphade, R., Kshirsagar, M., Kulkarni, P., Raste, S., Dharm, A., Patankar, S, Jogdeo, C., Sathe, A, Bapat, V, Joshi, R., Deshmukh, K., Lele, S., Manke, K., & Cantlon, J., & Pandit, P. (2024). Estimating excess COVID-19-related deaths: A multi-method approach [in press]. Scientific Reports.
  • Abhishek's paper on COVID-19 was accepted after a lot of unrelenting hard work and is currently in press.
• Cash, T., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (in press). Parental rights or parental wrongs: Parents’ metacognitive knowledge of the factors that influence their school choice decisions. PloSOne.
• Oszczapinska, U., Heller, L. M., Jang, S., & Nance, B. Ecological sound loudness in environmental sound representations. (2024). JASA Express Letters.
  • Urszula and her colleagues investigated whether the experimental custom of setting sounds to equal levels disrupts long-term sound recognition.

New Publications

• Heller, L. M., Oszczapinska, U., Smith, J. M., & Julien, M. M.,“Reassigning sources of misophonic trigger sounds to change their pleasantness: Testing alternative mechanisms with a new set of movies, paintings, and words” was recently submitted for review!

Invited Talks

• Oszczapinska, U., Heller, L. M., Smith, J. M., & Julien, M. M. (February 2024). Altering the perceived cause of unpleasant and misophonic sounds with videos and words. Invited talk at a young-investigator symposium at Association for Research in Otolaryngology at their 47th Annual Midwinter meeting on Emerging Perspectives on Misophonia in Anaheim, CA.
  • Funding for travel was provided by the CNBC Career Development Award that Urszula was awarded by the CNBC.
• Dedhe, A. M., Kulshrestha, K., Piantadosi, S. T., & Cantlon, J. F. (2024). Psychological algorithms of hierarchical cognitive reasoning. Invited symposium speaker at the International Conference on Analogy, Amsterdam, NL.
• Kumar, L. (February 2024).  Social cognition and problematic alcohol use: An organizing theoretical framework and  suggestions for future work. Invited talk presented in the OSHER adult education program. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
• Yunusova, A. (February 2024). Irritable bowel syndrome: through the lens of health psychology. Invited talk presented in the OSHER adult education program. Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA.

Asal presenting at the OSHER adult education program.

Conference Presentations

• Fiona presented a poster at the Society of Behavioral Medicine Conference: "Peer Interactions and Health Among Youth with Diabetes: An Ecological Momentary Assessment."
• Asal submitted an abstract, "The relation between stress and symptoms in Irritable Bowel Syndrome: A time series approach", for a poster to be presented at the Digestive Disorders Week conference.
• Kumar, L., Creswell, K.G., Brown, K.W., Lyons, G., Feeney, B.C. (Accepted for June 2024). The acute effects of alcohol on  emotion recognition in a sample of heavy-drinking young adults. Poster to be presented at the 47th annual meeting of the Research Society on Alcoholism. Minneapolis, MN.
• Zhou, A., Kumar, L., Lyons, G., Ethridge, H., & Creswell, K.G. (Accepted for May 2024). Acute alcohol intoxication impairs anger recognition. Poster to be presented at the 36th annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science. San Francisco, CA.

Grants and Awards

• Fiona was awarded an F31 from NIDDK for her dissertation, "Time-Varying Psychosocial Predictors of Blood Glucose Among Adults with Type 1 Diabetes."

Other News

• Abhishek was one of ten graduate students accepted to Santa Fe Institute's Graduate Summer Workshop on Computational Social Science!

Congratulations to all of the graduate students for their continuing hard work and recent successes!

Happy February! I hope you've started off the New Year on the right foot and are settling into the Spring semester. Please read about the recent accomplishments of our graduate students below!

New Publications

• Xie, Y. , & Feeney, B. C. ( Accepted). A Narrative Review of Research Linking Non-Sexual Social Touch to Sleep Quality. Journal of  Sleep Research.

Grants and Awards

• Emefa Akwayena had a poster entitled, "Ventral-Dorsal Stream Interactions Supporting Functional Object Grasps," accepted for a poster presentation at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting (April 2024) in Toronto, Canada.

Other News

• Austin Luor and Yuxi Xie successfully defended their dissertation proposals!
• Tim Murphy successfully defended his dissertation and is off to University of Wisconsin Madison to work as a postdoc with Ben Parrell and Carrie Niziolek at the end of the month.

Congratulations to everyone for their many achievements! If this newsletter has missed any exciting news, please send it along for the next edition!  Happy Spring Semester!