Merit Awards | Psychologically Speaking | Psychological Center | New Psychology Facility Gets Gold Rating | Archive 2007-2008
Psychological Center
A component of the Department of Psychology at Emory University, the Psychological Center was established to provide psychological services for the Atlanta community. In addition, it serves as a training facility for advanced doctoral candidates in clinical psychology.
Established in 1965 and accredited by the American Psychological Association, the Center is staffed by 13 licensed Ph.D. clinical psychologists and a group of advanced level graduate student trainees. A range of diagnostic and therapeutic services is provided for emotional and educational difficulties in children, adolescents and adults. Problems addressed include the range of concerns and disorders that bring people in for treatment. They range from psychological issues related to pregnancy and childbirth, anxiety, depression, relationship problems, family and marital conflict, and child behavior problems to school-related achievement concerns, learning disabilities and attention problems.
Individual, couples, family and group psychotherapy is available on a sliding fee sale ranging from $18 to $60 per session. IQ, learning disability, attention deficit disorder and neuropsychological assessment services are available at a reduced fee. The charge for IQ testing is $150. The fee for all other comprehensive testing services is $700.
Therapy and testing can also be provided by the licensed clinical psychologists on faculty. If this service is requested, standard fees are charged.
To arrange for appointment or to obtain additional information, please contact Dr. Cynthia Messina, Associate Director, at 404-727-7451.
Joshua Plotnik, Patrick Sylvers and Katherine Vytal – Winners of Dissertation Research Merit Award
This year, the Department of Psychology is pleased to present the Dissertation Research Merit Award to three outstanding graduate students: Joshua Plotnik, Patrick Sylvers and Katherine Vytal. The award is based on merit and intended to facilitate graduate dissertation research. The recipients are selected by a committee of faculty from the Department of Psychology.
Joshua (Josh) Plotnik is a sixth-year graduate student in the Neuroscience and Animal Behavior (NAB) program, working in the lab of Professor Frans de Waal. He received his BS from Cornell University in 2004, and his MA from Emory’s NAB program in 2006. His master’s research focused on mirror self-recognition (MSR) in Asian elephants, a cognitive capacity that is quite limited in the animal kingdom. This work was widely reported in the popular media, both because it was the first time this capacity had been reported in elephants, and also because of the public’s unusual interest in stories related to large-nosed pachyderms. MSR is often seen as a hallmark of self-awareness and thus is often tied to capacities such as empathy and altruism. These latter capacities formed the basis of his dissertation research, which took him from Atlanta to Thailand on a U.S. Department of Education Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, where he has worked for the past few years studying elephant behavior and cognition.
Josh is back in Atlanta watching elephants on TV monitors, coding data, and writing up his dissertation.
Pat Sylvers received an honors bachelor of science degree from the University of  Washington in 2002. In 2004, he began graduate school at Emory University, where he worked with Scott Lilienfeld and Patricia Brennan. He is currently completing his dissertation, Childhood Psychopathic Features and Aggression: A Test of the Fearlessness Hypothesis, and is going on clinical internship at the American Lake VA Hospital in August 2009.
Pat’s focus is on the development of aggressive behavior and personality disorders. Specifically, he is interested in biological vulnerabilities and early life experiences that put people at risk for these disorders. He is also interested in the role of gender and culture in the development and manifestation of personality disordered and aggressive behavior.
Katherine (Katye) Vytal received her BA (2004) and MA (2007) degrees in Psychology  from Emory University, and is currently a doctoral candidate in her sixth year of graduate school. She plans to graduate in May 2010 and begin a post-doctoral position shortly thereafter.
Katye’s research has focused on many different aspects of cognitive and affective neuroscience, including the neural circuitry of emotional and spatiotemporal memory encoding, the neural correlates associated with successful down-regulation of negative emotion, and the biological patterns of activation associated with basic emotion states (e.g., happiness, anger etc.). Her interest in the fragility of memory and the malleability of emotion states highlights her belief that mental experiences rely heavily on interactions across cognition, emotion and direct sensory perception.
Nonetheless, Katye also acknowledges the existence of consistency in both cognition and emotion processes, having shown that there are identifiable neural circuits that underlie spatiotemporal memory encoding and the experience of instructed fear. To explore the concept of biological stability further, her dissertation project focuses on investigating the reliability of neural and autonomic nervous system patterns of activity associated with emotional states. She contends that although situational context plays an important role in shaping our emotional experiences, there are nevertheless core biological signatures that accompany and differentiate our experience of happiness, sadness, anger, fear and disgust. Her dissertation findings will serve to clarify how healthy individuals experience emotion, and how individual differences in emotion-related neural responses can be explained by personality variables. By better understanding both the stability and malleability of emotional experience, psychotherapeutic techniques can be designed to more effectively treat emotional disorders such as depression.
Emory's New Psychology Facility Gets Gold Rating
Emory University's new Psychology and Interdisciplinary Sciences Building has been certified LEED Gold by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC). Emory completed construction on the 118,000 square foot building in May.
The academic and research facility is the third Emory building to receive LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Gold certification from USGBC in 2009. The University now has four LEED Gold-certified buildings in its collection of LEED buildings. LEED certification is a third-party verification system to assess a building's sustainability. Gold is the second highest certification, following platinum certification. Read more...
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