Become a Psychologist

Dr. David C. Cicero, Assistant Professor, is focused on understanding the mechanisms involved in the development of psychosis and using that understanding to improve our ability to predict and prevent future psychosis. Most social-cognitive models of psychosis have included two specific components: Aberrant salience (i.e., the unusual or incorrect assignment of significance or importance to stimuli, which is thought to be associated with dopamine dysregulation; Kapur, 2003) and self-processing (i.e., the way in which an individual processes information related to the self). His research program focuses on: (a) defining and measuring the constructs of aberrant salience and psychotic-like experiences; (b) examining the relations between self-processing and psychotic and psychotic-like experiences; and (c) investigating the interaction between aberrant salience and self-processing in psychosis. Dr. Cicero’s research uses questionnaire and interview assessments of psychotic symptoms, basic social cognitive neuroscience tasks to measure aberrant salience and self-processing, experimental psychopathology paradigms to understand normal and abnormal belief formation, and advanced statistical techniques to examine the factor structure of psychotic-like experiences.

Dr. Frank J. Floyd, Professor and Director of Clinical Studies Program, has research interests that include three longitudinal investigations of adaptation in families of children with intellectual and other disabilities. The goal of this work is to understand how family interactions and family relationships (marital, parent-child, sibling) are influenced by raising a child who has disabilities, and how family adaptation, in turn, influences the psychosocial development of the child and the health and well-being of all family members. Dr. Floyd has also conducted research on parental bereavement and on sexual orientation identity development and family relationships among gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth.