Research
Psychology students are encouraged to explore ongoing projects, collaborate on original research, and contribute to the field in meaningful ways. Reach out to faculty members to learn how you can get involved.
Ethics Approval for Research
All research conducted through Wesleyan’s Department of Psychology — including faculty, student, online, community-based, thesis, and independent research — requires ethics approval before data collection begins. Students must work with a faculty sponsor to submit a protocol. Minimal-risk studies may be reviewed by the Psychology Ethics Committee, while research involving vulnerable populations, sensitive data, or greater risk must be submitted to the University Institutional Review Board.
Psychology Research Labs
Sleep and Wellbeing
How sleep habits influence emotional health, relationships, decision-making, and everyday behavior during adolescence and emerging adulthood? We explore connections between sleep and factors such as social media use, emotion regulation, substance use, and psychosocial adjustment to better understand how sleep shapes mental health and development.
New Treatments for Mental Disorders
The CAPS Lab explores how thoughts and emotions shape the way people function, cope, and relate to the world around them. Researchers investigate what happens when these processes break down in conditions such as PTSD, anxiety, depression, and borderline personality disorder. Through behavioral studies and psychological assessment, the lab seeks better ways to understand, diagnose, and ultimately improve treatment for mental health disorders.
How Children Perceive the World
The Cognitive Development Labs study how young children learn about and understand the world around them. Through playful research activities and games, researchers explore how children think about numbers, space, language, and social relationships. The lab’s work helps uncover how cognitive abilities develop during early childhood and how children make sense of everyday experiences.
Memory, Cognition and Self
The MCS Lab explores how people perceive, interpret, and make sense of the world around them. Drawing from cognitive and social psychology, researchers study how identity, past experience, and emotion shape learning, memory, decision-making, and behavior — revealing how subjective human experience influences the way we think and act.
Reasoning and Decision Making
In the Reasoning and Decision Making Lab, we explore how people make choices under uncertainty, balance competing priorities, and assess risk and reward. Researchers study the roles of confidence, emotion, probability, and individual differences in decision making, examining how people evaluate options, commit to choices, and understand future outcomes in everyday life.
How the Brain Processes Language
The Eye Movement and Reading Lab studies how people recognize and understand words while reading. Using advanced eye-tracking technology, we examine how the brain processes language, how word meanings are organized in memory, and how early experiences with reading and language shape adult reading and comprehension. We are particularly interested in uncovering how the meanings of words are represented in the mental lexicon and how experiences with word learning in childhood impact lexicon organization into adulthood.
Suicide Risk Detection and Prevention
The Risk, Prevention and Intervention Lab is currently working on projects which examine suicide risk detection and intervention in romantic relationships, identify objective measures of the capacity to act on suicidal thoughts, and improve screening in primary care. Current research is funded by the Military Suicide Research Consortium.
