Carolyn Weisz, Professor, Psychology

Carolyn Weisz is a social psychologist with research interests in social perception, social identity, racism and prejudice, and homelessness. Her recent research on homelessness, conducted in collaboration with other scholars and the Pierce County Department of Community Connections, has focused on links between stigma, psychological distress, and physical health; racial disparities in homelessness; trauma; smoking; emotional labor among service providers; and organizational diversity climate. She serves on the leadership team of the University of Puget Sound’s Race and Pedagogy Institute and conducts research evaluating the impact of the Initiative’s events. Professor Weisz is on sabbatical during the 2022-2023 academic year.

Tim Beyer, Professor, Psychology

Tim Beyer is a developmental psychologist who is interested in how we make sense of what we hear. His research generally focuses on language comprehension in both monolinguals and bilinguals. He uses eye-tracking and reaction time measures to investigate the real-time processing and comprehension of language, focusing on how language minorities use standard American English grammatical morphology. More details about Tim's research can be found at http://www.tim-beyer.com.

Erin Colbert-White, Associate Professor, Chair, Psychology

Erin Colbert-White is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Puget Sound. Her research concerns features and outcomes of social interactions in a variety of social species. She studies parrot–human social relationships at the individual and group level in her work with parrots. This includes in-depth qualitative and quantitative measures of interactions between one parrot and its owner and work on nonverbal behavior and cue use across multiple individuals. The overarching purpose is to investigate the extent to which parrots adopt human-like social and verbal behavior.

With other species, her interests are also concerned with social cognition. This includes intra-species social behavior such as assessing empathy or altruism and inter-species social behavior such as social referencing cue use by dogs. More details about her research can be found at www.erincolbertwhite.com.

Melvin Rouse, Assistant Professor, Psychology

Melvin Rouse’s research looks at how hormones, the brain, and reproductive behavior interact. His lab uses songbirds as a model system. This model is unique in that it allows for the ability to study how gonadal hormones act to modulate patterns of learning and behavior, as well as how hormones affect the perception of behavior. These studies demonstrate the influence of the endocrine system on brain plasticity, learning, and social behavior. Rouse teaches in the areas of behavioral neuroscience, hormones and behavior, research methods and statistics, and comparative neuropsychology.

Sarah Moore, Professor, Psychology

Since joining the faculty in 1993, Sarah Moore's research has focused on the effects of work-related stressors, such as layoffs, reengineering, and various job characteristics on employee health, work attitudes, and work performance. Moore has also investigated work-home integration and conflict, the unique work stressors experienced by managerial women, and generational work differences and similarities. Her current research focuses on the changing social contract and how employees engage with their work and organizations.

Since 1996, Moore and her colleague Leon Grunberg (Professor Emeritus, Department of Sociology and Anthropology) have collaborated on a long-term study at Boeing Commercial, twice receiving funding from the National Institutes of Health to investigate the health and well-being effects of organizational change. Recently co-authored articles by Moore and Grunberg include “Navigating through turbulence at Boeing: Implications for employees, companies, and governments” (2013, Revue Francaise de Gestion), The Relationship between Work and Home: Examination of White and Blue-Collar Generational Differences in a Large U.S. Organization (2014, Psychology: Scientific Research), and Generational Differences in Workplace Expectations: A Comparison of Production and Professional Workers (2015, Current Psychology). Together with colleagues Edward Greenberg and Pat Sikora (University of Colorado, Boulder), Grunberg and Moore published a book under Yale University Press in 2010 titled, Turbulence: Boeing and the State of American Workers and Managers. Moore and Grunberg recently completed a second book titled Emerging from Turbulence: Boeing and Stories of the American Workplace Today (released October 2015 ) that describes the varied ways in which both veteran and new employees engage and find meaning in their work in Boeing’s post-merged organizational culture.