Psychology

University of California, Berkeley

This is an archived copy of the 2019-20 guide. To access the most recent version of the guide, please visit http://guide.berkeley.edu.

Spring 2020 COVID-19 Measures

Overview

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 normal development to pathological conditions. The Psychology Department at UC Berkeley reflects the diversity of our discipline's mission covering six key areas of research: Behavioral and Systems Neuroscience; Clinical Science; Cognition; Cognitive Neuroscience; Developmental, and Social-Personality Psychology. Despite the existence of these specialization areas, our program learning goals focus on fostering methodological, statistical and critical thinking skills that are not tied to any one particular content area in psychology but are relevant for all of them.

The Department of Psychology’s Postbaccalaureate Certificate Program is a comprehensive retraining and immersion program for students interested in applying to graduate school in psychology. The program features intensive coursework to complete an undergraduate psychology major in three or four semesters, research opportunities with our world-class faculty, in-depth advising, and a supportive community. If you are inspired to enter the field of psychology, switching focus from a previous major or changing careers, the postbaccalaureate program may be a path to consider.  

Clinic

The Psychology Clinic is a center for clinical training and research. The Psychology Clinic is part of the Clinical Science Program in the Department of Psychology at UC Berkeley. This graduate program is committed to excellence in scientific training, and to using clinical science as the foundation for designing, implementing, and evaluating assessment and intervention procedures. Established in 1963, The Psychology Clinic provides mental health services to Berkeley and surrounding Bay Area communities. We offer individual, child & adolescent, couples, parent training and family therapy. Our Clinic is dedicated to providing empirically supported treatments to the community, including those who are traditionally underserved and special populations including racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. In 2013, the Center for Assessment was opened within this clinic, which provides comprehensive assessment services for adults and children. As a center for excellence in clinical training, we provide top-quality training to approximately 20 Clinical Science Program Ph.D. students per year, as well as students from other areas of the Psychology Department and the School of Education. We also provide a clinical setting for pioneering research by faculty and students tackling critical questions related to mental.  These programs are funded from a variety of sources, including the National Institute of Aging, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute for Drug Abuse, and National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, and provide new tools for the assessment and treatment of children and adults, for a wide range of psychological conditions, including ADHD, dementia, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, anxiety, depression, and couples relationships.

Undergraduate Program

Psychology: BA

Graduate Program

Psychology: PhD

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Courses

Psychology

Faculty and Instructors

+ Indicates this faculty member is the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award.

Faculty

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

Sonia Bishop, Associate 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.
Research Profile

Silvia Bunge, Professor. Cognition, human brain function, development.
Research Profile

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

Anne Collins, Assistant Professor. Human learning, decision-making and executive functions, Computational modeling at multiple levels (cognitive and neuroscience), Behavioral, EEG, drug and genes studies in healthy or patient populations Human learning, decision-making and executive functions, Computational modeling at multiple levels (cognitive and neuroscience), Behavioral, EEG, drug and genes studies in healthy or patient populations .
Research Profile

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

Arianne Eason, Assistant Professor. Intergroup relations, prejudice, bias, social cognitive development, inequality, culture.
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Jan Engelmann, Assistant Professor. Developmental psychology, comparative psychology, cross-cultural psychology.
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Aaron Fisher, Associate Professor. Anxiety, depression, personalized medicine, psychotherapy, psychophysiology.
Research Profile

David Foster, Associate Professor. Behavioral and Systems Neuroscience , keywords: behavioral neurophysiology of spatial learning and memory, hippocampal replay, computational models of reinforcement learning and navigation.
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.
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Allison Harvey, Professor. Sleep, insomnia, comorbidity, bipolar disorder, cognition and emotion.
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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.
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Rich 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. Bipolar disorder, social dominance.
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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.
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Celeste Kidd, Assistant Professor. Attention, curiosity, learning, computational modeling, cognitive development.
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Robert Thomas 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

Lance Kriegsfeld, Professor. NeuroendocrinologyCircadian Biology, Neuroimmunology, cancer biology, animal behavior.
Research Profile

Ann M. Kring, Professor. Schizophrenia, emotion, gender, mental illness, psychology, psychopathology, emotion in social interaction, emotion and cognition, facial expression.
Research Profile

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

Nancy Liu, Assitant Clinical Professor. Implementation science, clinical training in empirically supported treatments for depression, trauma, and severe mental illness, underserved populations, mental health services in low-resource settings, primary care integration, global mental health .

Iris Mauss, Professor. Social psychology, personality psychology, affective science, psychophysiology, individual differences, emotion, emotion regulation, health psychology, happiness, well-being, psychological health.
Research Profile

+ Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, Professor. Diversity, intergroup relations, education, prejudice, stigma.
Research Profile

Ken Nakayama, Adjunct Professor. Visual surfaces, the deployment of visual attention, and the role of attention in initiating eye movements, using visual psychophysical tests to assess neurological and psychiatric disorders .

Jason Okonofua, Assistant Professor. Mindsets, Large-scale psychological intervention, Relationships, Stereotyping, Prejudice, Stigma, Education, Interactional Justice, School-to-prison pipeline.

Steven Piantadosi, Assistant Professor.
Research Profile

Mahesh Srinivasan, Associate Professor. Development, Language development, cognition.
Research Profile

Frank J. Sulloway, Adjunct Professor.

Frederic Theunissen, Professor. Behavior, cognition, brain, psychology, birdsong, vocal learning, audition, neurophysiology, speech perception, computational neuroscience, theoretical neuroscience.
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Matthew P. Walker, Professor. Plasticity, learning, memory, fMRI, emotion, sleep, EEG.
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Joni Wallis, Professor. Prefrontal cortex, neurophysiology, executive control, decision making.
Research Profile

Kevin Weiner, Assistant Professor. Visual perception, face processing, structural-functional relationships assessed using a variety of (a) functional measurements (e g high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging, electrocorticography, etc ) and (b) anatomical measurements in-vivo (e g diffusion weighted imaging, cortical folding, etc ) and post-mortem (e g cytoarchitecture, myeloarchitecture, etc ), comparative neuroanatomy, development, translational applications for patient populations.
Research Profile

David Whitney, Professor. Cognitive neuroscience, cognition, attention, visual perception, vision, visually guided action.
Research Profile

Linda Wilbrecht, Associate Professor. Neuroscience, addiction, early life adversity, adolescence.
Research Profile

Fei Xu, 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

Qing Zhou, Professor. Culture, family, child development, developmental psychopathology, immigrants.
Research Profile

Emeritus Faculty

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

Carolyn Pape Cowan, Professor Emeritus. Child development, psychology, couple relationships, parenting styles, family transitions, preventive intervention.
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+ Philip Cowan, Professor Emeritus. Couple relationships, family factors in children's development, parenting, fatherhood, preventive intervention with families.
Research Profile

Karen K. De Valois, Professor Emeritus. Psychophysics and electrophysiology of color vision, spatial vision and visual motion.
Research Profile

+ Stephen E. Glickman, Professor Emeritus. Animal behavior, physiological substrates of behavior, hormonal substrates, spotted hyenas, sexual differentiation, vertebrate behavior.
Research Profile

Ervin R. Hafter, Professor Emeritus.

Ravenna M. Helson, Professor Emeritus. Personality, psychology, adult development, psychology of women, creativity, enduring affective-cognitive styles, life choices, roles, retirement, changes in the self, the development of wisdom, gender issues.
Research Profile

Erik David Hesse, Adjunct Associate Professor.

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

Jonas Langer, Professor Emeritus.

Mary Main, Professor Emerita.

+ Christina Maslach, Professor Emeritus. Health psychology, individuation, burnout and job stress.
Research Profile

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

+ Gerald A. Mendelsohn, Professor Emeritus.

Charlan Jeanne Nemeth, Professor Emeritus. 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

Stephen E. Palmer, Professor Emeritus. Psychology, visual perception, visual processing.
Research Profile

Kaiping Peng, Professor Emeritus. Psychology, East Asian studies, social cultural sychology, reasoning and judgment across cultures and domains, inter-ethnic, racial relations, cross-cultural communication and understanding.
Research Profile

William Prinzmetal, Adjunct Professor Emeritus. Behavior, cognition, brain, attention, psychology, visual perception.
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Donald A. Riley, Professor Emeritus. Behavior, learning, memory, cognition, brain, psychology.
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Lynn C. Robertson, Adjunct Professor Emeritus. Cognitive neuroscience, attention, psychology, representations of objects and space, visual search, binding mechanisms, perceptual organization in normal and neurological populations, functional hemisphere asymmetries, spatial deficits.
Research Profile

Eleanor Rosch, Professor Emeritus. Cognition, psychology, concepts, Eastern psychologies, psychologies of religion, cross cultural, causality.
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Arthur P. Shimamura, Professor Emeritus. Cognitive neuroscience, behavior, cognition, brain, psychology, frontal lobe function, basic memory research.
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Dan I. Slobin, Professor Emeritus. Sociolinguistics, behavior, cognition, brain, psycholinguistics, psychology, language and cognitive development, sign language, cross-cultural.
Research Profile

John S. Watson, Professor Emeritus. Psychology, development in infancy, evolution of psychological processes in artificial life.
Research Profile

+ Rhona Weinstein, Professor Emeritus. Community psychology, educational inequality and the achievement gap, teacher expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies, classroom and school reform.
Research Profile

Sheldon Zedeck, Professor Emeritus. Statistics, organization, psychology, research methodology, industrial, social psychology, personnel, cross-cultural work values, decision-making research, work and family issues, the work values of Chinese employees.
Research Profile

Irving Zucker, Professor Emeritus. Biological rhythms, seasonality, behavioral endocrinology, melatonin, suprachiasmatic nucleus, reproductive physiology, behavior, ultradian rhythms, sex differences.
Research Profile

Contact Information

Department of Psychology

2121 Berkeley Way

Phone: 510-642-5292

Fax: 510-642-5293

Visit Department Website

Department Chair

Ann Kring, PhD

3316 Berkeley Way West

kring@berkeley.edu

Department Vice Chair

Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, PhD

3428 Berkeley Way West

rmd@berkeley.edu

Department Vice Chair

Lance Kriegsfeld, PhD

G71A Koshland

kriegsfeld@berkeley.edu

Student Services Director

Harumi Quinones

2210 Berkeley Way West

Phone: 510-642-7097

harumi@berkeley.edu

Graduate Student Services Adviser

Julie Aranda

3301-10 Berkeley Way West

Phone: 510-642-1382

jaranda321@berkeley.edu

Undergraduate Student Services Adviser

Arlene Diaz

2210 Berkeley Way West

Phone: 510-643-8114

arlenediaz@berkeley.edu

Undergraduate Student Services Adviser

Christine Mullarkey

2210 Berkeley Way West

Phone: 510-643-8114

cmullarkey@berkeley.edu

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