Faculty Achivements
Faculty Awards and Honors
Debrielle Jacques is a winner of NIH’s Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research (OBSSR) Matilda White Riley Early-State Paper Competition. The honor recognizes emerging scholars whose research reflects excellence in health-related behavioral and social science research, and the potential to significantly impact the field. The winning paper, published in Development and Psychopathology in 2024 examines mothers’ insensitivity to infant’s emotional vulnerability as a mechanism linking maternal alcohol dependence and infant long-term emotional and behavioral reactivity. Results implicate expressive suppression (or the masking, downplaying, or over-regulation of emotions) as an early protective, adaptive coping strategy infants may use to navigate caregiving and family environments that are negatively impacted by their mother’s alcohol dependence problems. Read the open access paper.
Additionally, Jacques recently joined a Research Expert Advisory Group (EAG) for the National and State Survey of Child and Adolescent Well-Being (NSSCAW), sponsored by the Administration for Children & Families. The advisory group will help mold and refine a nationally representative, longitudinal survey of children and families who have been the subjects of investigation by Child Protective Services. A refined NSSCAW strives to include and center the voices of children, parents, and others with lived experience navigating CPS systems, and examines how aspects of the child welfare system intersect with individual, community, structural, and societal factors to affect child and family well-being.
Jeansok Kim received a 5-year R01 award ($3M) from the National Institutes of Health. Award title: Neural Dynamics of Fear Circuits in Ecological Rodent Models of Risk and Trauma. Fear is a fundamental mechanism that allows animals to evade predators in their habitats and enables humans to protect themselves from interpersonal threats in society. This research will employ ecologically-relevant 'approach food-avoid predator' paradigms to explore the neural dynamics of fear circuits that guide purposive behaviors - integrating navigation, decision-making, and vital actions in real-world scenarios where threats from animate entities are often ambiguous.
Marsha Linehan received the Lifetime Achievement Research Award from the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention in May. Lineham received the award for “her formidable research and clinical contributions, including the creation of DBT, which is considered the gold-standard treatment for patients with borderline personality disorder and those with suicidal behavior,” the foundation wrote on its website.
Debrielle Jacques’ research talk “Trouble ‘Troubleshooting’?: Person-Centered Examinations of Associations between Maternal Alcohol Dependence Symptoms, Maternal Psychopathology, and Caregiving in Dyadic Problem-Solving Tasks,” was one of only five international Submitted Talks selected to represent the field of Developmental Psychology at the 2025 Association for Psychological Science Convention in Washington, D.C.
The research featured in the talk leverages latent profile analyses (LPA) to identify “hidden” profiles of caregiving displayed in a racially diverse, higher-risk sample of mother-infant dyads navigating goal-oriented problem-solving tasks.”
Tony Greenwald was honored with the Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Social Sciences for his work developing the implicit associate test for measuring bias. Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji first put forward the idea of implicit bias in their 1995 paper “Implicit Social Cognition: Attitudes, Self-esteem and Stereotypes,” published in the journal Psychological Review.
“In it, the two researchers described what was known about implicit attitudes and stereotypes, while acknowledging that there was as yet no means of measuring them,” Frontiers of Knowledge said in the award announcement, quoting Greenwald: “We ended that article with a sentence saying that it would really be nice to have a measure that could assess individual differences in implicit attitudes and stereotypes.” Greenwald went on to develop the implicit association test, which “measured reaction times in classifying prompts, a method both easy to use and readily obtainable,” the announcement states, adding that, “This method has served as a starting point for numerous applications in clinical psychology, education, marketing and diversity management, and has been used for data collection in over 2,000 papers.” Read more on the Frontiers of Knowledge Award website.
Faculty Publications
Andrew Meltzoff and Sapna Cheryan were among the co-authors of research from the University of Houston that found that students don’t view all STEM subjects alike. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a prestigious journal of the National Academy of Sciences. Read the study.
Priscilla Lui’s paper was selected by the editor of Cultural Diversity & Ethnic Minority Psychology, in the American Psychological Association, as an Editor’s Choice Selection. Grad student, Sarah Gobrial, was a co-writer. The paper is titled “Effects of racial discrimination on stress, negative emotions, and alcohol craving: A registered report of a virtual reality experiment.” Read the paper.
Liliana Lengua published a book, “Parenting with Temperament in Mind,” with the American Psychological Association. Read more about the book.
Liliana Lengua, Debrielle Jacques and their team published “Temperament and Child Development in Context” in Cambridge University Press. Read the paper.
In the News
Lucía Magis-Weinberg’s research on cell phones in schools was featured in GeekWire. Read the story at GeekWire.
Z Yan Wang was quoted in Arts Technica about the oddities of the cephalopod nervous system. Read more at Ars Technica.
A study from Jen Forsyth and Angela Fang’s lab highlighting the differences in generalized anxiety disorder between children and adolescents was featured in a PsyPost article. Read the study at PsyPost.
Carly Gray was interviewed by UW News about her recent study published in the Journal of Environmental Education about the importance of interacting with nature. Peter Kahn and Greg Bratman co-authored the paper. Read the interview at UW News.
Clara Wilkins and Rosemary (Marah) Al-Kire penned and article in The Conversation on their research on beliefs about anti-Christian discrimination and its ties to attitudes about race. Read the article at The Conversation.
Angela Fang, director of the CoNNeCT Lab, was interviewed by The Daily for a story on the lab’s social anxiety disorder study. Read the story at The Daily.
Sapna Cheryan was quoted in Business Insider in an article discussing resurgent machoism in corporate America. Read the article at Business Insider.
Liliana Lengua, founder and director of the UW Center for Child & Family Well-Being, was interviewed by the University of Washington Magazine. Read the article at University of Washington Magazine.
Andrew Meltzoff’s research on infants imitating facial expressions was referenced in a UVA Today article. Read the article at UVA Today.
Kevin King was quoted in Science about NIH’s consolidation plan for reviewing grant applications. Read the article at Science.
Delancey Wu explained self-determination theory in a University of Washington Magazine article. Read the article at University of Washington Magazine.
Z Yan Wang was interviewed in the Transmitter about octopuses and the neuroendocrinology of death. Read the interview at the Transmitter.