Welcome to the homepage of the Social Psychology Program at Miami University. Our program is comprised of several faculty members who teach a variety of undergraduate courses as well as supervise the training of our graduate students in our Social Psychology doctoral program. To the right is our 2007 group photo, taken inside our brand new Psychology Building. Our new building features outstanding research space and teaching facilities.

Throughout the year, we have many events, including weekly SPRIG (social psychology research interest group) brownbags, visiting speakers in our department's colloquium series, and numerous conferences that feature strong social psychology components.

We are pleased to announce the hiring of Amy Summerville, who will begin her position as Assistant Professor of Psychology in August, 2008. Summerville is currently completing her Ph.D. in Psychology at the Univ. of Illinois. Her primary research interests include counterfactual ("if only...") thinking and its implications, affect and its influence on social judgment, culture, and self-regulation processes. We're excited to have Amy joining our social program.

Also, we're excited to announce recent successes in obtaining NSF support for on-going research in our social psychology program. Currently, there are four different active NSF grants award to social faculty. Most recently, Susanne Abele and Gary Stasser were awarded a grant to support their on-going research on tacit coordination. Also, congratulations go out to Kurt Hugenberg and to Heather Claypool, each of whom received grants from the National Science Foundation to study cross-race facial identification (Hugenberg) and to study how the experience of familiarity affects our judgment and feelings (Claypool). Congrats to Kurt, Heather, Susanne, and Gary for their awesome achievements!

Congratulations to Steve Young, Michael Bernstein, and Kurt Hugenberg for winning the Graduate Student Poster Award at the SPSP conference held in January in Memphis on their poster entitled, "The own group bias in facial recognition: A cross categorization effect." With over 1100 posters at SPSP, this is definitely an honor, and certainly one that is well-deserved.

We also congratulate to social alum Robert "BJ" Rydell (Ph. D., 2005), who began as an Assistant Professor of Psychology position at the Univ. of Missouri, in August 2007. Recently, BJ's dissertation (Rydell & McConnell, 2006) was published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and his recent Psychological Science paper (Rydell, McConnell, Mackie, & Strain, 2006) was recognized with a Science Editors' Choice publication in 2007. Congratulations BJ!

If you are considering applying to our doctoral program, you can learn more about our program and its faculty's research interests by reading their homepages and by e-mailing them. Also, you are encouraged to contact our graduate students for their perspectives on our program. If you want to learn more about social psychology in general (e.g., other social programs and other social psychologists from around the world, teaching resources on the web), visit the Social Psychology Network.

Finally, we would like to extend a big welcome to our new graduate students who will be joining us in the 2008-09 academic year: Sara Austin, Emily Clark, Matthew Groebe, and Isaiah Jones. Welcome to Miami University!