ISU Innovation
The theme of this issue of PsyClone is innovation. What has our Psychology Department done to advance President Wintersteen’s new brand campaign, Innovate at Iowa State? Dr. Wintersteen sees the university as a place where innovation and entrepreneurship are part of every college. She put Iowa’s money where her brand is with the new Student Innovation Center which opened in August 2020. The 144,000 sq. ft. building sits on Bissell Road where the Nuclear Engineering Laboratory and parts of Sweeney Hall used to be before demolition in 2017. A third of the cost of the $84M Center came from an anonymous donation. The donor’s only request was that the building be open to all colleges and all students.
“Over the last decade or so, our undergraduate students have seen that this is an opportunity for them as well. To learn what it means to have a start-up — to take a new enterprise home to the family farm,” said Wintersteen on RadioIowa.
To explore the new Center visit sictr.iastate.edu.
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What is the Value of X?
After graduating with a degree in psychology from ISU in 2016, Quin DeVries (pictured left) headed to The University of Michigan for a MS in information science specializing in UX research and design. For those of us who graduated before the 2016, there are various permutations of U and X. UX refers to user experience, CX to customer experience and UI is enhancing UX with various interfaces, i.e., a website, app, kiosk, touch screen or smart device.
While in Ann Arbor, Quin moved from an internship at Mitsubishi Electric Automotive America to full time employment. He studied how Mitsubishi might respond if car owners perceived their GPS, connected phone or even Sirius XM as pathways for a cyberattack. Few see a threat today, but Quin’s research looked at perceptions and responses two to five years in the future.
In May 2021, Quin moved across the country to Seattle for a job as an associate XD (Experience Design) consultant at Slalom. “Here I have worked in the domains of online retail, medical insurance, and local utilities. In one project, I used human-centered design to help streamline the Medicare process and make it easier for end users,” said Quin in an email. He found consulting moves at a faster pace than Mitsubishi, and with more interfacing with stakeholders. Flexibility and an ability to pivot and try something new are essential skills in UCD – user centered design.
For those interested in his work at Mitsubishi, Quin recommended classes in industrial psych, consumer behavior, qualitative research, design thinking and creative problem solving. He needed his grad courses in product, interaction, graphic and human-centered design to master the art of consulting.
Want to know more about Quin and his work? Message him through linkedin.com.
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Improving Recall During a Pandemic
Those sick with COVID or exposed to someone with the disease may slow the spread of infection by simply notifying the people they had physical or social contact with in the past several days. Tracing contacts is an effective process that has been around for decades. In the 1960s, it helped control syphilis by employing hundreds of psych BAs tasked with tracing the sexual contacts of those diagnosed. Diseases have changed, but not the central problem with contact tracing: the inability to recall.
Dr. Chris Meissner, winner of the 2021 ISU award for Outstanding Achievement in Research, is applying the science of memory to contact tracing. He and colleagues at Florida International University developed an anonymous, private, online, do-it-yourself tool for tracing your contacts.
CogTracer uses prompts, in words and photos, to spark your memory for as many contacts and locations visited as possible. It urges you to look back at often overlooked information such as social media posts and credit card records. These prompts help reduce the chances of forgetting a close contact by 50% on average.
A perfect place for the administrative use of Cog Tracer is when someone takes a test for the virus. Meissner has found that CogTracer is effective for children, young adults, adults and older adults.
The program takes advantage of two cognitive phenomena: varied retrieval – prompting memory with different key words – and context reinstatement – mentally reliving an event to include what you wore, said and saw.
Meissner has extended the scope of CogTracer to victims of sexual assault, particularly on university campuses. The program not only improves a victim’s recall of events and descriptions, but it also provides a safe and comfortable context for recall.
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Jessica Munoz and team win Entrepreneurship prize on Global Impact
A group that included psychology graduate student, Jessica Munoz, presented a pitch at Iowa State's Innovation Prize competition. The competition asks participants to come up with solutions to one of three categories of world problems. The categories were Edtech, which addresses issues in education and teaching. Agtech which addresses issues in agriculture. And finally, Global Impact, addressing broad approaches to solving issues like poverty and world hunger.
Munoz and her group won the Pappajohn Entrepreneurship Center's Innovation Prize for their Global Impact pitch. Their group presented a pitch for creating an app to help decode the language of people who suffer from aphasia, allowing them to communicate their most basic needs.
The competition was funded by the ISU Pappajohn Center for Entrepreneurship, and the Agricultural Entrepreneurship Initiative. Jessica's group won $1500 for their pitch.
Click here to read the full article.
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Dr. Warren Phillips innovates to help rural areas gain access to mental health care
There is a shortage of mental health resources in America, and during the Covid-19 pandemic this shortage was revealed even more.
Dr. Warren Phillips, associate teaching professor in psychology and practicing psychologist in Ames, teamed up with Ashley Scudder, lecturer in Human Development and Family Studies to develop an innovative, virtual mental-health professional network that allows rural Iowans greater and more convenient access to behavioral care.
Phillips, along with his operations and clinical team, worked to enroll medical providers and school districts into the network for free. The providers enrolled get access to licensed mental health care professionals whenever they deem it necessary for the wellbeing of children and their families.
Adding innovator and entrepreneur to his list of accomplishments, Dr. Phillips says, "For me, the innovation and entrepreneurship are a means to an end that I feel passionate about. It's not the end itself. It's just a way to bring about a much-needed change."
Click here to read the full article.
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Forensic Techniques Examined
Dr. Stephanie Madon
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“My research lies at the intersection of psychology and law,” said Dr. Stephanie Madon. “Throughout my career, I have strived to address the problem of wrongful conviction.” Madon, who joined the ISU faculty in 1999, is the 2021 winner of the Cassling Innovation Award given annually by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
The award was established by Dr. Randal S. Cassling and Lori S. Cassling to facilitate new directions in faculty research, especially interdisciplinary research and scholarship.
Madon will use the Cassling funds during her sabbatical semester to further her research on forensic techniques that contribute to wrongful convictions. For the past 20 years, for example, the FBI has used microscopic hair analysis to convict defendants. In 2015, the FBI admitted that the strength of hair analysis was exaggerated in 95% of the cases it reviewed. Madon’s sabbatical semester will be spent recruiting prosecutors to examine their use of forensic terms such as “match,” “inconclusive” and “elimination.” Do prosecutors agree on the meanings of these terms? Are these terms less objective than they appear? “The potential for misinterpretation is a serious matter,” said Madon. “A categorical decision that improperly conveys the strength of a forensic result can lead innocent people to be convicted and the guilty get away with their crimes.”
Madon also commented on the notorious Reid Technique routinely used by police departments to interrogate suspects. “In a nutshell,” wrote Madon, “the Reid Technique is very good at getting confessions. The problem is that the confessions are sometimes false.”
Congratulations, Dr. Madon! The PsyClone applauds your work. You are helping improve the American justice system using our society’s most underappreciated tool for good, psychology.
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Dr. Randal S. Cassling and Lori S. Cassling |
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This is my final issue as editor of PsyClone, the alumni newsletter for the ISU Psychology Department. I am happy to claim the honor of being the newsletter’s originator and first editor. We began PsyClone in the spring of 2019 because we psych alums NEED a connection with the department we love. I hope this way of keeping up with the events and people of the department will prosper without me. You can make that hope a reality. If you live in Iowa (I hang my hat in North Carolina), like to write and can visit the campus occasionally, please consider volunteering for this pleasant twice-a-year job. With editor’s credentials, you will be amazed, impressed and proud of ISU Psych and have the added benefit of sharing those impressions with others.
Best wishes to all ISU psych alums. Go Cyclones! Go PsyClones!
Pete Prunkl
Salisbury, North Carolina
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From the Chair's Desk
It’s an exciting time to be at ISU. Now that we are back to campus, our faculty are continuing use technology to improve student learning and enhance the student experience. Where will this take us? With the development of immersive technologies, we may see classes that do projects, recreate classic psychological studies, or conduct research using virtual reality tools. I haven’t taught while serving as Chair, but I look forward to teaching my course on Cultural Psychology and giving students opportunities to interact and work with students and faculty in far-flung locations via Zoom and other new technologies. The ISU psychology course of the future is sure to look very different than those you and I experienced.
One of our innovations in the past 3 years has been the introduction of this newsletter, thanks to alumnus Pete Prunkl. Pete volunteered to initiate this newsletter for us, and we’ve worked together to bring you information about what’s happening on campus and around the department. As Pete steps away from this role, we thank him for his enthusiasm for this task, for his creative ideas, and his love for the ISU Department of Psychology. Pete, we couldn’t have done it without you.
If you have any interest in stepping in to this role as the newsletter editor (or co-editor), please don’t hesitate to contact me at [email protected].
Finally, in the spirit of Thanksgiving, I want to thank you for your continued support for Iowa State and the Department of Psychology. It is my great honor to be part of PsyClone nation!
Gratefully,
Susan E. Cross, Chair
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The PsyClone is published periodically throughout the academic year.
Pete Prunkl, Off-Campus Editor, helped lauch the Psyclone. We are currently looking for a new editor(s). If you are interested, please send an email to [email protected].
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