PhD in Developmental Psychology

The program is designed to provide training leading to the Doctor of Philosophy degree in psychology with a concentration in Developmental Psychology. The program emphasizes the collaboration of full-time faculty members and graduate students on research projects, as well as more traditional classroom instruction. The current faculty members are unified by a focus on the critical role that contexts play in the processes that govern the emergence and organization of behavior during development. Each faculty member approaches this issue via his or her specific research interests, but all are ultimately interested in how experiential and maturational processes, broadly defined, continually influence each other to shape developmental trajectories and outcomes. Their specific research interests span several areas of development, including the development of auditory processing, the perceptual abilities of typically developing infants and consequences of deprivation, socioemotional development in the contexts of peer relationships and parent-child interaction, the emergence of linguistic structure and meaning, and similarities and differences in the development of typical and atypical children.