Julie M. Hupp, PhD, email contact: hupp.34@osu.edu
- When learning the English language, is shape the easiest property with which preschool-aged children can form associations? How does this change with language learning? What do adults do in the same types of learning situations? How does the richness of the language context play a role?
- At what age can children differentiate nouns and adjective in sparse vs. rich learning environments? Does increasing the saliency of the adjective frame increase understanding or differentiation of word class? What are the most important aspects or cues of the rich adjective frame (e.g., are word endings special)?
- How does verb learning develop in children? Do they have differential attentional tendencies in verb learning situations than do adults? How does this change with familiarity of objects?
Melissa K. Jungers, PhD, email contact: jungers.2@osu.edu
- MEMORY FOR MUSIC AND TEXT. Memory for spoken sequences involves syntax, semantics, & prosody. Likewise, memory for melodies involves musical structures as well as performance-specific prosody. How do these elements combine in memory? When a melody and text appear together in song, what is the memory representation.
- PROSODY (emphasis and pitch, the way something is said). What aspects of prosody influence perception and later memory for music and speech? Do the prosodic dimensions differ across the two domains? Do the prosodic dimensions change across age?
Sara Staats, PhD, email contact: staats.1@osu.edu
- HOPE AND CREATIVITY. I have defined Hope as the interaction of wishes and expectations regarding future goals. Being hopeful encourages one to move out and engage the environment. Distant goals tend to be though of in a more abstract way and near goals tend to thought of in a more concrete fashion. Currently, I am exploring the role of hope on different aspects of creativity. I want to find out (my research question) if the time frame of Hope (near or distant) is related to performance on creativity tasks. I predict that a distant time frame will be associated with better performance on some tasks of creativity.
- HUMAN ANIMAL BOND. Humans have been associated with animals from early times as indicated by early cave drawings and by co-located human animal burials. One of my research questions is "why do people keep pets today?" Some research indicates that pet ownership is beneficial to the human's health. This claim is disputed by other research. There are conflicting results in the literature. One of my research questions here is , under what conditions are pets likely to provide a human health benefit? A research hypothesis is that belief in the health giving benefits of pets is a positive factor in health.
- SOURCES OF COLLEGE HAPPINESS AND COLLEGE STRESS. I am replicating and extending an earlier published research based on a Newark OSU sample of 1983 students. My research questions are "Have sources of happiness and stress changed over the past twenty years and have they increased or decreased?" One of my predictions is that Sources of College Happiness will have increased between 1983 and 2003. I also hypothesize that predict or hypothesize that the relative ranks of items such as "getting my degree" will remain about the same of the time period.
- OLDER PERSONS AND THEIR WELL-BEING. One of several interests concerns work travel in older workers. After 9/11 there has been a general increase in travel concerns that has had a major impact on individuals and the world. My research question is do men and women have different types of concerns and different levels of concern regarding travel, especially by air. I predict, or my research hypotheses are that women will express more concern about safety than men but that women will not decrease their travel proportionately more than men.