Department Directory

Currently Accepting Graduate Students; Not Currently Undergraduate Assistants

Research Info:

In the Neuropsychology & Psychopathology Lab (NPL) we utilize cognitive neuropsychology, experimental psychopathology, and meta-analytic research methodologies to gain insight into the association between psychopathological processes, cognitive functioning, and real-life daily functioning.

We are currently interested in:

1. Cognitive functioning in obsessive-compulsive and related disorders, as well as related psychological constructs.
2. Transdiagnostic patterns of cognitive dysfunction associated with psychological disorders, and psychopathological processes. We are particularly interested in factors associated with underperformance on neuropsychological tests, including motivational factors, self-perceptions, and self-efficacy.
3. Ecological and predictive validity of neuropsychological tests/functions/deficits in the context of real-life daily functions across clinical and non-clinical populations.
4. The definition and quantification of cognitive dysfunction, and particularly the terms ‘impairment’ and ‘deficit’.
5. The translational value and legitimacy of cognitive ‘endophenotypes’ and disorder-specific ‘markers’.
6. Psychopathological mechanisms and neuropsychological correlates of Misophonia.
7. Impulsivity and response inhibition in the context of the impulsive-compulsive continuum.

Not Currently Accepting Graduate Students or Undergraduate Assistants

Dr. Aljunaidy's research interest is interdisciplinary and focuses on the link between interior design and people’s mental health. Dr. Aljunaidy is conducting research about how interior design can support people who suffer from dementia, and people who suffer from stress. 
Furthermore, Dr. Aljunaidy is currently a researcher and a leader of a project funded by Horizon 2020. The project assesses researchers’ mental health all over Europe. 

Not Currently Accepting Graduate Students or Undergraduate Assistants

Currently accepting graduate students; Not currently accepting undergraduate students

Dr. Rhonda Balzarini is an Assistant Professor at Texas State University and an Affiliate Faculty member with the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University. Dr. Balzarini is a social psychologist studying the interpersonal processes that enhance and detract from the quality of romantic and sexual relationships. Her recent research focuses on how diverse couples can have satisfying and passionate relationships and successfully navigate challenges and distressing situations.

Not Currently Accepting Graduate Students or Undergraduate Assistants

Dr. Bitney teaches full-time in the psychology department as a Clinical Assistant Professor and also runs a group practice in Austin, TX (www.txopps.com). Their work in the clinical realm helps inform their teachings within the department, providing real-life examples to add depth to classes like psychopathology and personality psychology. Dr. Bitney serves a leadership role within the Asian American Psychological Association and has a strong background in intersectionality, often working with racial/ethnic minorities and sexual and gender diverse clients. For students interested in the counseling professions, Dr. Bitney provides pre-clinical advising so they can learn more about the field and prepare for graduate school. Email bitney@txstate.edu to set up a pre-clinical advising session.

Dr. Bryson's research focuses on ways to improve quality of life for adults with rare diseases. Specifically, she examines ways to improve social support and symptom management in this population, as well as ways to reduce various forms of stigma. Her research utilizes both qualitative and quantitative methods. 

Not Currently Accepting Graduate Students or Undergraduate Assistants

Dr. Ceballos’ research focuses on disentangling the contributions of common factors that may accompany or predate the development of addictive behaviors.  Much of her work has examined neurophysiological indices of addiction-related cue reactivity in college drinkers, as well as the influence of factors such as stress and acculturation on the use of alcohol and other drugs.  Dr. Ceballos’ research program has been funded by external grants from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the Integrative Neuroscience Initiative on Alcoholism Consortium, and Humanities Texas

Currently Accepting Graduate Students & Undergraduate Assistants

Dr. Jennifer Clegg directs the Learning in Context (LinC) Lab and her research examines the impact of culture on children's social cognitive development. Dr. Clegg's work incoporates diverse methodologies from cognitive psychology, cultural anthropology, and educational psychology to examine the various ways that children learn from others. Specifically, Dr. Clegg's work tends to examine how cultural emphasis on conformity impacts the development of children's social behaviors (such as imitation and social interactions with others) and beliefs (including early religious cognition). 

Not Currently Accepting Graduate Students or Undergraduate Assistants

Currently Accepting Undergraduate Assistants; Currently Accepting Graduate Students

Academic Program Director of Study Abroad in Greece

Dr. Czyzewska's research interests revolve around social cognition, with a specific emphasis on exploring how implicit biases and cultural factors shape individuals' perceptions of others, influencing attitudes and behaviors. Her current research aims to advance our understanding of how social cognition operates in the digital realm and investigates mechanisms that impact interpersonal perceptions and communication in virtual spaces. The ongoing work focuses on the role of nonverbal cues in expressing emotions and decoding the affective tone of messages in texting.

Not Currently Accepting Graduate Students; Not Accepting Undergraduate Assistants

Currently accepting Undergraduate and Graduate Students.

Research Info:

The overall goal of our research is to understand how we learn and remember items, how these memorial processes are altered or impaired by aging and disease, and how we can use preserved memorial processes to improve the daily lives of older adults and patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD).  In our lab, we use both behavioral and event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine these questions.

Not Currently Accepting Graduate Students or Undergraduate Assistants

Currently Accepting Graduate Students; Not Accepting Undergraduate Assistants

Research Info:

One of my main research interests has involved different factors that affect functional abilities, such as work performance, cognitive performance, and neuropsychological functioning. Previous studies have examined whether induced pain reduces performance on measures of memory, attention, and other cognitive abilities. To date, we have found little to no impact of pain on several cognitive measures. A related research interest has involved the influence of disability exaggeration, including malingering, on different psychometric instruments, and the ability of validity measures to detect malingering. In addition, I am interested in the ways that different forms of psychopathology may impair neuropsychological functioning, and to what extent such deficits may be explained by self-fulfilling expectations of poorer performance. Although in the early stages currently, I am also interested in the efficacy of a low-intensity Behavioral Activation approach as a lower-cost and more accessible treatment for depression as well as PTSD. 

Not Currently Accepting Graduate Students or Undergraduate Assistants

Not Currently Accepting Graduate Students; Not Currently Accepting Undergraduate Assistants

Research Info:

Dr. Graham's research is in the area of social/affective neuroscience; in particular, the electrophysiological and behavioral correlates of visual processing evoked in response to stimuli of motivational significance (e.g., social and appetitive stimuli). Current research interests lie in understanding how individual differences in attitudes and exposure to target stimuli moderate attentional processes and event-related potentials (ERPs) to appetitive and motivationally relevant stimuli like faces, bodies, food, alcohol, and tobacco. This research enriches our understanding of motivation from a basic science perspective, with implications for our understanding of phenomena such as social anxiety and prejudice, as well as health-risk behaviors.

Accepting Graduate Students; Not Accepting Undergraduate Assistants

Research Info:

In my research, I have applied social psychological principles to the understanding of interpersonal factors in health and the process of medical care. My work deals with two main areas: (1) patients' adherence to medical recommendations for healthy behavior and the prevention and treatment of disease and (2) medical visit communication in the dyadic health professional-patient relationship. I am particularly interested in psychosocial factors that predict adherence and health behavior change as well as interventions to improve adherence and healthy behavior in patients with chronic illnesses. Current research involves development and testing of mobile health interventions.

Accepting Graduate Students; Not Accepting Undergraduate Assistants

Research Info:

The primary focus of my research is to use a biopsychosocial approach to identify risk factors associated with health behaviors and outcomes for various chronic health conditions. I also am interested in medical conditions including chronic pain and endocrine disorders, and occupational health, maternal health, military well-being, and social media research.

Not accepting undergraduate or graduate students

Currently Accepting Graduate Students; Not Accepting Undergraduate Assistants

Research Info:

Dr. Kelemen’s research focuses on metacognition, which includes the monitoring and control of one’s own cognitive processes. Specifically, Dr. Kelemen focuses on individuals’ judgments of learning (JOLs) about their future memory performance. He has examined factors that influence JOL accuracy, that is, the relationship between JOLs and subsequent memory performance. These factors include characteristics of the items themselves, study procedures, and the influence of mild stimulants including caffeine and nicotine. Most recently, he has collaborated on research focused on the role of exercise on memory and JOLs.

Currently Accepting Undergraduate Assistants; Not Accepting Graduate Students

Not Currently Accepting Graduate Students or Undergraduate Assistants

Dr. Mayberry teaches statistics and social psychology. She also supervises an internship in social emotional learning. Her interests are emotional intelligence and social emotional learning. She has a passion for teaching and making statistics feel interesting, enjoyable, and useful.

Not Currently Accepting Graduate Students or Undergraduate Assistants

Not Currently Accepting Graduate Students or Undergraduate Assistants

Currently Accepting Undergraduate Students; Currently Accepting Graduate Assistants

Research Info:

Broadly, my research interests are in social, personality, cultural and health psychology areas. Specifically, I investigate how personality factors interact with social and cultural factors to influence personal health decisions. My aim in research is also the improvement of health behaviors and outcomes for at risk populations. I have examined women’s adherence to following medical advice, e.g. taking folic acid, to prevent neural tube defects and couple’s engagement of high risk sexual behaviors in interpersonal relationships that place individuals at risk for HIV. The research in these areas has identified key risk factors and has advanced recommendations to reduce such risks.

More recently my interests have turned to emotion recognition research. Individuals differ in their abilities to detect emotions in others. My research explores psychological states and physical conditions that impair or facilitate emotional recognition in others. Also recently, a colleague and I have investigated the psychology of the treatment of immigrants in this country. Specifically, we examined immigrant characteristics and key psychological factors, and their links to perceivers’ feelings and behaviors toward immigrants.

Though the search for human universals is important, I have discovered that emotions, cognitions and behaviors cannot be fully understood unless their culture, is taken into account. We are embedded in contexts that shape and give meaning to our thoughts and behaviors. Thus, it is my belief that the key to understanding human behavior is knowing culture.

These are the areas of research that are of great interest to me.

Currently Accepting Graduate Students; Not Accepting Undergraduate Assistants

Research Info:

My research spans the subfields of cultural, health, and cognitive psychology. In my Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Awareness (IDEA) lab, we explore how culture and diverse social identities influence behavior, cognition, health, and well-being. These identities may include race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, and more. Of particular interest are the lived experiences of underrepresented people, how those experiences relate to inclusion and equity, and the impact of those experiences on mental and physical health. Current projects are investigating a variety of research questions, including how disordered eating behaviors vary in LGBTQ+ communities and across different racial and ethnic groups, how enculturation and ethnocultural empathy relate to prosocial behaviors and attitudes, how cultural and other factors affect the well-being of Hispanic individuals, and how prejudicial and discriminatory biases impact the interpersonal relationships and well-being of deaf individuals.

Currently Accepting Graduate Students or Undergraduate Assistants

Research Info:

At this time, I have three main areas of research interest. First, I engage in Scholarship of Teaching research on how what faculty do (and teach) in the classroom has an impact student tolerance for ambiguity in dealing with diverse others. Second, I have conducted several large-scale studies (across multiple cities) assessing cynicism in police officers. I am especially interested in what factors lead to the development of cynicism in officers, the impact of cynicism in officers (in terms of their personal lives and how they conduct themselves as officers) and what agencies might do to reduce the negative effects of cynicism in officers. Lastly, I have worked with athletes and athletic programs at the university level to assess the relationships between personality characteristics and vulnerability to and recovery from injury and how athletes attribute their own injuries and those of their teammates.

Currently Accepting Graduate Students and Undergraduate Assistants

Dr. Jessica Perrotte's research examines the interplay between sociocultural processes and cognitive factors in relation to health risk behaviors such as alcohol (mis)use. Her work often focuses on Hispanic/Latina/o/e/x populations with an added emphasis on gender.  Dr. Perrotte is the director of SCCAERAB (Social, Cultural, and Cognitive Approaches to Examining Risky and Addictive Behaviors), a highly active lab with several concurrent and ongoing projects. Though there is a strong emphasis on quantitative methods at SCCAERAB, the lab aso incorporates qualitative methods to explore research questions from a more nuanced perspective. Dr. Perrotte has current and previous funding from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. 

Currently Accepting Graduate Students; Currently Accepting Undergraduate Assistants

My program of research broadly aims to understand, improve the assessment of, and intervene upon processes that confer risk for suicidal ideation, intent, and behavior. Using a transdiagnostic framework, my research addresses two primary questions: (1) what contributes to the development and maintenance of suicidal thoughts and behaviors? and (2) when (and under what circumstances) do transitions from suicidal thoughts to actions occur? Specifically, one line of my research focuses on the interplay between cognitive dysfunction (rumination, attentional biases, hopelessness) and biobehavioral factors (agitation, sleep disturbances, overarousal) as short-term risk factors for suicidal ideation and attempts. Another line of my research has focused on general and suicide-specific factors that may facilitate a transition from suicidal thoughts to actions, particularly in the hours to days preceding a suicide attempt.

Future complementary areas of research include:
1. Examining the phenomenology, etiology, and temporal dynamics of acute suicidal crises in the hours preceding a suicide attempt
2. Determining whether there are individual differences (e.g., genetic, neurobiological, psychological, sociocultural, and/or pragmatic moderators) in the trajectories of short-term suicide risk between individuals
3. Innovating suicide risk assessment and management through the development, validation, and dissemination/implementation of scalable, feasible, and tailorable interventions
4. Improving the precision and ecological validity of measurement
5. Applying advanced quantitative methods to these research questions

Not Currently Accepting Graduate Students or Undergraduate Assistants

Robyn R. Rogers, LPC, is a Senior Lecturer on the full-time faculty in the Psychology Department at Texas State University- San Marcos, Texas, where she has served since 1981. She teaches online courses in the Cognitive- Behavioral discipline including: Cognitive- Behavioral Therapies, and Reality Therapy-Choice Theory. She also teaches Adolescent Psychology, and The Applied Internship in Psychology, a Service- Learning Course. Since 2020, Robyn's classes are fully online.
Ms. Rogers is a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC), and is certified in Choice Theory and Reality Therapy (CT/RTC) by The William Glasser Institute in 1999. She served on the Board for the WGI Sunbelt Region for several years. Her practice focuses on helping people make changes in their lives by making better choices, and helping people to improve relationships in all areas of life. After graduating from The University of Arkansas-Fayetteville, she began her career teaching at Texas State University. She also has a small private counseling and consulting practice. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Areas of Interest: Cognitive-behavioral therapy; Youth-at-risk
Applied Internships with Cognitive-Behavioral and Neurological Disabilities; Youth-at-risk; Hays Caldwell Womens Center (abuse); and Veterans. 

Currently Accepting Graduate Students; Not Accepting Undergraduate Assistants

Research Info:

Dr. Schepis’ research focuses on substance use across the lifespan, with a particular focus on prescription drug misuse (PDM). PDM is use of opioid, benzodiazepine, or stimulant medication in ways not intended by the prescriber or withour a prescription. His research focuses on different age groups, including adolescents, young adults and young adult college students, and older adults. Other interests concern PDM and cannabis/marijuana use in health disparate populations, like those who identify as members of racial/ethnic minority groups, sexual and gender minority groups, and socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals.

Currently Accepting Undergraduate & Graduate Assistants 

Research Info:

Dr. Tooley's research seeks to discover how structural (especially grammatical) knowledge is represented and accessed during normal language use. I probe structural representation in language via research on structural priming effects during online comprehension and production of sentences, using measures such as eye tracking, reading times, and elicited speech. I also apply structural priming paradigms to investigate how aspects of prosody (e.g., rate, intonation, and pitch) are represented and how structure is processed in other cognitive domains, such as mathematics.

Not Currently Accepting Graduate Students or Undergraduate Assistants

Research Info:

Dr. Logan Trujillo Ph.D. is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Texas State University and a research consultant at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas. He holds degrees in mathematics, physics and psychology (B.S., M.A., B.S./Ph.D.) from the University of Arizona. Dr. Trujillo’s research interests are highly interdisciplinary and provide basic and applied insight into the physical, neural, and psychological mechanisms underlying human information processing (including sensation & perception, attention & mental workload, cognitive control, social preferences, and consciousness). He accomplishes this via measurement and computational modeling of behavior, subjective reports, and non-invasive electroencephalographic (EEG) and event-related potential (ERP) signals of bioelectric brain activity.

Currently Accepting Graduate Students & Undergraduate Assistants

Research Info:

Dr. Warnell directs the Social Cognition Across Development (SCAD) Lab at Texas State. The SCAD Lab uses a combination of neural, eye-tracking, and behavioral measures to study social cognition and social behaviors in preschoolers, school-aged children, and adults. The lab's overarching research goal is to quantify the complex cognitive mechanisms underlying real-world social behaviors across development. Some representative research questions include: (1) How do we understand other people’s thoughts and emotions? (2) What motivates human to interact with each other? (3) How are social thoughts and behaviors different in kids and adults? (4) How does autism influence social behaviors?

Currently Accepting Graduate Students; Not Accepting Undergraduate Assistants

Research in Dr. Westerberg's Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory examines how memories change over time and during sleep. She is interested in how neural reorganization of knowledge may impact memory strength, memory accuracy, creativity, problem solving, and other cognitive processes. These questions are investigated using behavioral and electrophysiological methods in healthy adults, patients with sleep disorders, and in aging and Alzheimer’s disease.