About the Program

Psychology as a scientific discipline aims to describe, understand, and predict the behavior of living organisms. In doing so, psychology embraces the many factors that influence behavior - from sensory experience to complex cognition, from the role of genetics to that of social and cultural environments, from the processes that explain behavior in early childhood to those that operate in older ages, and from typical development to pathological conditions. The Department of Psychology at Berkeley reflects the diversity of our discipline's mission covering five key areas of research: Behavioral Neuroscience; Change, Plasticity, & Development; Clinical Science; Cognition, Brain, & Behavior; and Social-Personality Psychology. Our program learning goals focus on honing methodological, statistical and critical thinking skills relevant to all areas of Psychology research; enabling students with sufficient breadth to retain perspective in the field of psychology and sufficient depth to permit successful independent and significant research.

The major academic objectives of the PhD program are for students to:

• Develop an understanding of the different theoretical and empirical frameworks that have defined and shaped the field
• Develop an understanding of the central questions and issues in contemporary psychology
• Develop expertise in one or more relevant research methodologies
• Build expertise in formulating testable hypotheses and designing appropriate studies
• Hone ability to critically evaluate scientific research
• Develop expertise in statistics and advanced data analytic approaches
• Develop an awareness of the importance of science to humanity while recognizing its limits (i.e., some scientific knowledge is culture specific and may not be applicable to the human condition universally)
• Develop competence as a teacher of undergraduates and mentor to graduate students

Students select one of the following concentrations:

1. Behavioral Neuroscience: Programs in Behavioral Neuroscience focus on animal behavior, sensory physiology, biological rhythms, and ethological approaches. Research programs in this area are extensively integrated with those involving human research. Areas of specialty within this track include: Hormones and Behavior, Sensory Systems, Neural Basis of Learning and Memory, and Neuroethology.
2. Change, Plasticity, & Development: Research examines numerous areas of development, plasticity, and change including sensory processes, cognitive capacities, language, everyday knowledge of the world, emotions, and social relationships. We utilize cross-species comparisons to help us elucidate core mechanisms. Finally, we examine both typical and atypical development, each providing rich insights for better understanding the other and suggesting new approaches for effective treatments and preventive interventions.
3. Clinical Science: Clinical Science is a psychological science directed at the assessment, understanding, and amelioration of human problems in behavior, affect, cognition, or health, and at the application of knowledge to such problems in ways consistent with scientific evidence. The emphasis on the term “science” underscores a commitment to empirical approaches to advancing knowledge.
4. Cognition, Brain, & Behavior: With an appreciation of a broad-based analysis of behavior, the Cognition, Brain, & Behavior program offers graduate training and research programs in two broad areas: Cognitive Neuroscience and Cognitive Psychology.
5. Social-Personality Psychology: Social psychology concerns itself with the effects of other people on the individual as well as with interaction between persons. Personality psychology is concerned with the ways individuals perceive, act upon, and understand their respective worlds as they seek to establish adaptive life modes. The joint, integrated program provides training in six core areas: Self, identity, and culture; Social cognition; Emotion, motivation, and health; Personality processes and adult development; Interpersonal and intergroup relations; and Groups and organizations.

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Admissions

Admission to the University

Uniform minimum requirements for admission

The following minimum requirements apply to all programs and will be verified by the Graduate Division:

1. A bachelor’s degree or recognized equivalent from an accredited institution;
2. A minimum grade-point average of B or better (3.0);
3. If the applicant comes from a country or political entity (e.g. Quebec) where English is not the official language, adequate proficiency in English to do graduate work, as evidenced by a TOEFL score of at least 570 on the paper-and-pencil test, 230 on the computer-based test, 90 on the iBT test, or an IELTS Band score of at least 7 (note that individual programs may set higher levels for any of these); and
4. Enough undergraduate training to do graduate work in the given field.

Applicants who already hold a graduate degree

The Graduate Council views academic degrees as evidence of broad research training, not as vocational training certificates; therefore, applicants who already have academic graduate degrees should be able to take up new subject matter on a serious level without undertaking a graduate program, unless the fields are completely dissimilar.

Programs may consider students for an additional academic master’s or professional master’s degree if the additional degree is in a distinctly different field.

Applicants admitted to a doctoral program that requires a master’s degree to be earned at Berkeley as a prerequisite (even though the applicant already has a master’s degree from another institution in the same or a closely allied field of study) will be permitted to undertake the second master’s degree, despite the overlap in field.

The Graduate Division will admit students for a second doctoral degree only if they meet the following guidelines:

1. Applicants with doctoral degrees may be admitted for an additional doctoral degree only if that degree program is in a general area of knowledge distinctly different from the field in which they earned their original degree. For example, a physics PhD could be admitted to a doctoral degree program in music or history; however, a student with a doctoral degree in mathematics would not be permitted to add a PhD in statistics.
2. Applicants who hold the PhD degree may be admitted to a professional doctorate or professional master’s degree program if there is no duplication of training involved.

Applicants may only apply to one single degree program or one concurrent degree program per admission cycle.

Any applicant who was previously registered at Berkeley as a graduate student, no matter how briefly, must apply for readmission, not admission, even if the new application is to a different program.

Required documents for admissions applications

1. Transcripts:  Upload unofficial transcripts with the application for the departmental initial review. Official transcripts of all college-level work will be required if admitted. Official transcripts must be in sealed envelopes as issued by the school(s) you have attended. Request a current transcript from every post-secondary school that you have attended, including community colleges, summer sessions, and extension programs.
   If you have attended Berkeley, upload unofficial transcript with the application for the departmental initial review. Official transcript with evidence of degree conferral will not be required if admitted.
2. Letters of recommendation: Applicants can request online letters of recommendation through the online application system. Hard copies of recommendation letters must be sent directly to the program, not the Graduate Division.
3. Evidence of English language proficiency: All applicants from countries in which the official language is not English are required to submit official evidence of English language proficiency. This requirement applies to applicants from Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Latin America, the Middle East, the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and most European countries. However, applicants who, at the time of application, have already completed at least one year of full-time academic course work with grades of B or better at a U.S. university may submit an official transcript from the U.S. university to fulfill this requirement. The following courses will not fulfill this requirement: 1) courses in English as a Second Language, 2) courses conducted in a language other than English, 3) courses that will be completed after the application is submitted, and 4) courses of a non-academic nature. If applicants have previously been denied admission to Berkeley on the basis of their English language proficiency, they must submit new test scores that meet the current minimum from one of the standardized tests.

Admission to the Program

The Department of Psychology invites applications from students who are primarily interested in research. Applicants for the Psychology PhD are required to specify the area to which they wish to apply: Behavioral Neuroscience; Change, Plasticity, & Development; Clinical Science; Cognition, Brain, & Behavior; Social-Personality. Applicants are required to name at least one faculty member with whom they wish to work.

Applicants must hold a Bachelor’s degree or its equivalent from an institution of acceptable standing, and may hold a Master’s in Psychology or another field. Previous concentration in Psychology is not required. The Department does not have an application for a terminal Master’s degree; PhD only.

Doctoral Degree Requirements

Normative Time Requirements

Normative Time in the Program

Normative time in the Department of Psychology for doctoral degree completion is 10 semesters, and normative time in candidacy is 4 semesters. (See departmental website for details.)

Step I: Students take courses, narrow down their interests to particular areas of specialization, and begin research projects. This takes approximately 1 year.

Step II: Students complete majority of course requirements and prepare for their written and oral Qualifying Examination. This takes approximately 1-2 years.

Step III: Students undertake research for the PhD dissertation under a 3-4 person committee in charge of their research and dissertation. Students do original research and write up the dissertation based on their results. On completion of course requirements and approval of the dissertation by the committee, students are awarded the doctorate. This takes approximately 2 years.

Time to Advancement

Curriculum

Behavioral Neuroscience Concentration

Change, Plasticity, & Development Concentration

Cognition, Brain, & Behavior Concentration

Social-Personality Concentration

Clinical Science Concentration

Additional Program Requirements

• Internship, Field Work, or Practicum – Clinical Science only
• Clinical Practice – Clinical Science only
• 2^nd-Year Poster Presentation
• 3^rd-Year Paper Requirement
• Qualifying Examination
• CITI Protocol Course Certifications

Time in Candidacy

• Dissertation Proposal
• Dissertation
• Dissertation Presentation/Exit Talk

Professional Development

• PSYCH 292 Introduction to the Profession of Psychology, PSYCH 293 Second-Year Seminar on Professional Development, and PSYCH 375 Teaching Psychology

• Presentations

• Teaching
• Professional Conference Attendance
• Workshops

Courses

Psychology

Faculty

Professors

Silvia Bunge, Professor. Neural mechanisms, development, and plasticity of higher cognitive functions in humans.
Research Profile

Joseph J. Campos, Professor. Social-emotional development in infancy, emotional communication, perception of emotion, relation of motor development to cognitive and social and emotional development.
Research Profile

Serena Chen, Professor. Close relationships, social cognition, social psychology, Self and identity, relational self, collective self, social power.
Research Profile

Mark T. D'Esposito, Professor. Cognitive neuroscience, psychology, working memory, frontal lobe function, functional MRI, neurology, brain imaging, dopamine.
Research Profile

Jack L. Gallant, Professor. Vision science, form vision, attention, fMRI, computational neuroscience, natural scene perception, brain encoding, brain decoding.
Research Profile

Alison Gopnik, Professor. Learning, philosophy, psychology, cognitive development, theory of mind, young children, children's causal knowledge, Bayes Net formalism.
Research Profile

Allison G. Harvey, Professor. Sleep, insomnia, comorbidity, bipolar disorder, cognition and emotion.
Research Profile

Stephen Hinshaw, Professor. Psychology, child clinical, developmental psychopathology, risk factors for attentional, conduct disorders, child psychopharmacology, multimodality interventions, diagnostic validity of disorders, peer relationships, stigma of mental illness.
Research Profile

Richard Ivry, Professor. Cognitive neuroscience, behavior, cognition, brain, attention, coordination, psychology, motor and perceptual processes in normal and neurologically impaired populations, temporal processing, executive control.
Research Profile

Lucia F. Jacobs, Professor. Cognitive and brain evolution, adaptive patterns in spatial memory, spatial navigation, cognitive sex differences and decision making.
Research Profile

Oliver P. John, Professor. Research methods, personality, measurement, emotion regulation, personality structure, personality development, traits, Big Five model, individual differences, emotion expression, self-concept, accuracy, bias, self-knowledge, personality assessment.
Research Profile

Sheri Johnson, Professor. Understanding the predictors of depression and mania within bipolar disorder, reward sensitivity and social dominance system within mania and psychopathology .
Research Profile

Dacher Keltner, Professor. Culture, conflict, behavior, love, psychology, emotion, social interaction, individual differences in emotion, negotiation, embarrassment, desire, juvenile delinquency, laughter, anger, social perception, negotiating morality.
Research Profile

John F. Kihlstrom, Professor. Personality, behavior, memory, psychology, cognition in personal, social contexts, unconscious mental processes, hypnosis, social cognition, experimental psychopathology, health cognition, unconscious mental life.
Research Profile

Robert T. Knight, Professor. Cognitive neuroscience, language, physiology, memory, attention, psychology, working memory, neuropsychology, human prefrontal cortex, neural mechanisms of cognitive processing, sensory gating, sustained attention, ad novelty detection.
Research Profile

Ann M. Kring, Professor. Emotional features of schizophrenia, the linkage between emotion and other cognitive and social deficits in schizophrenia, emotion, social interaction, and social anxiety, emotion, and depression. Emotion: individual differences in emotional expression, gender and emotion, the relationship between social context, personality, and emotion.
Research Profile

Robert W. Levenson, Professor. Aging, gender, culture, brain, psychology, emotion, psychophysiology, marriage, clinical science, interpersonal interactions, dementia, relationships, neurodegenerative disease.
Research Profile

Mary Main, Professor. Attachment; animal behavior; ethology; narrative; Gricean maxims as related to life-history descriptions; children's drawings and other representational products as related to attachment.

Laura B. Mason, Professor. Psychotherapy research, treatment development,. dissemination science, and community mental health.

Charlan J. Nemeth, Professor. Decision making, jury decision making, influence and persuasion, creativity in small groups, managing innovation in organizations, psychology of creative scientists and entrepreneurs, corporate cultures, diversity of team members, brainstorming, psychology and law.
Research Profile

Frederic E. Theunissen, Professor. Behavior, cognition, brain, psychology, birdsong, vocal learning, audition, neurophysiology, speech perception, computational neuroscience, theoretical neuroscience.
Research Profile

Matthew P. Walker, Professor. Impact of sleep on human brain function, especially the role of sleep in: learning and memory; brain plasticity; emotional regulation; affective and clinical mood disorders and aging.
Research Profile

Jonathan D. Wallis, Professor. Executive control; goal-directed behaviors.
Research Profile

David Whitney, Professor. Visual perception and attention; visually guided action; cognitive neuroscience.

Fei Xu, PhD, Professor. Conceptual development, developmental psychology, cognitive development, language development, social cognition in infants and children, learning in infants and young children, statistical learning and statistical inference, psychology and philosophy, computational models of cognitive development.
Research Profile

Associate Professors

Ozlem Ayduk, Associate Professor. Violence, developmental psychology, psychology, depression, self-control, emotion regulation, social-cognition in interpersonal relationships.
Research Profile

Tom Griffiths, Associate Professor. Machine learning, computational models of human cognition, Bayesian statistics.
Research Profile

Lance J, Kriegsfeld, Associate Professor. Behavioral neuroendocrinology, circadian biology, reproductive behavior and physiology, seasonality/photoperiodism, behavioral genetics, behavioral neuroscience.
Research Profile

Tania Lombrozo, Associate Professor. Cognitive psychology of explanation and understanding; concepts, theories, and causality; moral reasoning; philosophy and psychology.

Iris Mauss, Associate Professor. Emotion and emotion regulation; psychological health; psychophysiology; sociocultural norms and beliefs; aging and emotion regulation.
Research Profile

Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, Associate Professor. Education, stereotyping, intergroup relations, prejudice, interpersonal relations, stigma.
Research Profile

Qing Zhou, Associate Professor. Developmental psychopathology, emphasis on the roles of temperament, emotion-related processing, and family socialization in the development of child and adolescent psychopathology and competence; cultural influences on socio-emotional development.
Research Profile

Assistant Professors

Sonia J. Bishop, Assistant Professor. Neural mechanisms supporting attention, emotion and their interactions; individual differences in cognitive control and emotional responsivity; neural substrate of anxiety; genetic factors modulating recruitment of cortical control and limbic affective mechanisms.

Esther Brass, Assistant Professor.

Michael Cole, PhD, Assistant Professor.

Aaron Fisher, Assistant Professor. Person-specific methodologies; formulation of personalized interventions; psychotherapy; psychophysiology of anxiety disorders; psychopathology and cardiovascular disease.

Mahesh Srinivasan, Assistant Professor. How representations of language and concepts arise and interact in human development and across cultures.

Linda Wilbrecht, Assistant Professor. Experience dependent plasticity and the development of circuits involved in value based decision making; addiction.

Adjunct Faculty

Arthur Aron, Adjunct Faculty.

Michael Cole, Adjunct Faculty. Cognitive and emotional control in clinical populations; neural mechanisms of interactions between cognition and emotion; contemplative neuroscience.

Carolyn Cowan, Adjunct Faculty.

Erik Hesse, Adjunct Faculty. Attachment and evolution; narrative; disorganized and unclassifiable child and adult attachment status; alterations in normal consciousness as related to adverse attachment experiences; effects of frightened and frightening parental behavior.

William Prinzmetal, Adjunct Faculty. Behavior, cognition, brain, attention, psychology, visual perception.
Research Profile

Lynn Robertson, Adjunct Faculty.

Frank J. Sulloway, Adjunct Faculty. Personality development and family dynamics, especially in relation to life history and creative achievement; evolutionary psychology; biological evolution, including reproductive success, anti-predator responses, and adaptive divergence in Darwin's finches and other avian species; history of science (Darwin, Freud, and revolutionary innovations) .