Department of Psychology

The Psychology Department announces an Honors Program to provide enriched research training for a small group of the most motivated and accomplished psychology majors. The Honors Program will provide students with the opportunity to be immersed in the research process under the mentorship of a faculty member. In close interaction with their mentor, students will complete a research project that will constitute a novel contribution to the psychological sciences.

Download the Honors Program Application for 2010-2011

Contact the Honors Program directors, Professor Fathali Moghaddam or Professor Chandan Vaidya
 

Our honors students (2009-2010) presented their outstanding  projects in a poster session held on April 23, 2010. Family, friends, faculty members, and faculty guest, Dr. Francys Subiaul of GWU, joined the celebration.

Honors Students (2009-2010)

• Alexander E. Buckley (Fathali Moghaddam, PhD)
  The Influence of Gender on Perceptions of Rights and Duties
• Joanna M. Lee (Darlene Howard, PhD)
  The Effects of Goal Motivation on Implicit Sequence Learning
  
• Kyla A. Machell (Abigail Marsh, PhD)
  Emotion Recognition and Psychopathic Personality Traits
• Marta J. Perez (Sandra Calvert, PhD)
  Infants' Visual Attention to Videos as a Function of Auditory Features of the Program
  
• Ashley J. Tedone (Rachel Barr, PhD)
  Content Analysis of Language-Promoting Teaching Strategies: Do Strategies Match the Claims in Infant Directed Media?
  

***View past years' honors students and their projects

Size of the Psychology Honors Class

The Honors class, by design, will be small. It will vary as a function of the number of faculty members willing and able to accept Honors students. To ensure a high quality of the intensive research experience, each faculty member can mentor up to two Honors students per academic year, and because of prior responsibilities, may not find it possible to mentor any Honors students in a particular academic year.

Criteria for Acceptance

1) The willingness of a full-time psychology faculty member to mentor a student is the most important criterion for acceptance into the Honors Program.

2) Students should have an overall GPA of 3.5 or higher. In very exceptional circumstances, an exemption to this rule may be issued by the faculty mentor.

3) Students should have completed or be currently completing Research
Methods and Statistics (PSYC 002) when they apply. In very exceptional circumstances, an exemption to this rule may be issued by the faculty mentor.

Application Procedure

All interested students should complete the Honors Application Form, which includes a summary of the proposed research project.

1) A completed Honors Application Form must be submitted to one of the Co-Directors by the first day of pre-registration during the Spring semester of the student’s 3rd year. An exemption to this rule may be issued by the faculty mentor.

2) The Honors thesis must be turned in to one of the Co-Directors by April 15 of the student’s 4th year.

Ordinarily, students interested in joining the Psychology Honors Program should be fully engaged in the Program for at least the Fall and Spring semesters of their 4th year. However, the particular research approach and teaching schedules of some faculty may result in a different timing for students interested in working with them. Further, in the case of students who plan to study abroad, the student and mentor must come to an agreement about how study abroad will impact the work of the student as part of the Honors Program, prior to the student entering the Program.

Nature of Psychology Honors Program Activity and Product

To qualify to graduate with Honors in Psychology, students must:

(i) complete an Honors thesis that meets the set requirements by the specified deadline and agree to it being posted on the Honors Program’s webpage.

(ii) participate in at least four Honors research ‘brown-bag’ meetings, and make a presentation about their Honors thesis in one such meeting.

(iii) maintain satisfactory progress during the Honors year; if the mentor indicates that progress is unsatisfactory by the end of the first semester of the Honors program, the student will be terminated from continuing in the Honors program in the second semester.

(iv) present a poster in the Annual Psychology Honors Research Conference to be held in the Spring semester of each year.

Honors Thesis

Ordinarily students will participate in an ongoing research program directed by a professor. The particular form and method of the project will be decided by the mentor and the student. However, the Honors thesis must ‘stand alone’, make a novel theoretical, empirical, or integrative contribution to a branch of psychological science, and be of a high enough quality to be submitted for publication or for presentation at a scientific conference. The faculty mentor will determine if the thesis meets that requirements, and in some cases the mentor may invite a second reader to evaluate and contribute to the thesis.

‘Brown-Bag’ Honors Meetings

The Co-Directors of the Honors Program will coordinate six brown bag research meetings during each academic year, two in the Fall and four in the Spring semester. Each student will make at least one presentation at these meetings. The goal of these meetings is to provide the student with an insider’s view of the research process. Students will critically discuss the research literature related to their Honors Theses, as well as their progress.

Credit Hours

Students will register for ‘Honors Symposium’ PSYC 499 (3 credit hours) in the first semester of entrance to the Honors Program. This will count as fulfilling one of the two Seminar requirements for the Psychology Major.

Graduation with Honors

All students who successfully complete Honors requirements will have ‘Honors Psychology Major Complete’ recorded on their transcripts.