Psychology Department

Clarkson’s Department of Psychology provides a solid foundation in psychology and courses of study in the areas that interest you most, with customized education tracks that can be developed to fit your goals. Our low student-to-faculty ratio provides hands-on learning experiences like directed research, during which you work closely with one of our full-time faculty members on an experiment of mutual interest.

We also offer clinical internships, during which you work with professional psychologists in clinical settings in a variety of fields (e.g., neurorehabilitation, mental health, drug and alcohol rehabilitation). Check out the research projects that our students have done throughout their time at Clarkson.

As for facilities, the Evolution of Cognition Lab allows students to study how natural selection has shaped the cognitive mechanisms underlying human decision-making behavior under risk and uncertainty and how these mechanisms operate in domains such as risk-taking, mate choice and foraging for food and information. The Social Development and Health Research Lab examines how social pain negatively impacts mental and physical health, as well as how people determine when to offer help or express concern when they see someone experiencing health problems. In the Motivation & Emotion Lab, researchers study how motivation affects social perceptions, relationships and behavior. The Culture, Family, and Child Development Lab explores how contextual factors shape children's development of self-regulation by looking into the intersecting contributions of context in cultural and socioeconomic conditions and nurture in family relationships and secure attachment.

In the Hearing and Attention Lab, we use electrophysiology and neuroimaging to examine the effects of directed attention on auditory processing and how these effects are modulated by factors like cognitive skill and task difficulty. Additional work both within our lab and in collaboration with external investigators aims develop objective diagnostic techniques for clinical populations where these capacities may be disturbed. The Phenomenology Lab allows students to explore the subjective experience of those with mental disorders, as well as the human experience more generally.