Catherine Caldwell-Harris, Ph.D.

(formerly Catherine Harris; I married Edmond Caldwell May 2005)


Associate Professor of Psychology
Department of Psychology, Boston University
64 Cummington St Boston MA 02215 Email: charris@bu.edu

Office: Rm 123 Phone: (617) 353-2956 Lab: Rms 127-129 Information about Research Internship (see also Lab page)

Curriculum vitae (cv with links to publications, html)


Courses

Spring 2006 - Spring 2007

Semester 

Number 

Title 

Course Overview 

Spring 2007 PS 241 Developmental Psychology MWF 2-3 courseinfo.bu.edu
Spring 2007 PS 504 Evolutionary Psychology and Religion Tues 12:30-3:00 Syllabus (pdf)
Summer 2007 PS 560 Cross-Cultural Psychology Syllabus (pdf)
Fall 2007 PS 545 Language Development Fall 07 (doc)
Fall 2007 PS 828 Psycholinguistics course flyer (pdf)
Spring 2008 Sabbatical Will conduct research for the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation (see cv) Press release (html)

Students interested in working with me as a teaching intern can learn more about this from my 'teaching intern report . Examples of some lectures (older,from the days before courseinfo).


Research and Background

I was trained at UC San Diego, 1985-1991, where I learned from Elizabeth Bates, Jeff Elman, David Rumelhart, Rama Ramachandran, Ronald Langacker, Patricia Churchland and (via CMU) Brian MacWhinney and Jay McClelland (and of course many other wonderful teachers and scholars). I have been a faculty member at BU since 1991.

My research interests are broad, encompassing diverse aspects of language processing, including second language acquisition, emotional aspects of language, and word recognition. I am the first researcher to document that emotion words elicit larger skin conductance responses in a first language than in a second (see paper in Applied Psycholinguistics, pdf). I am currently studying emotional reactivity in the U.S. for speakers who grew up speaking Russian, Mandarin, or Spanish, as well as English native speakers who learned Russian as a foreign langauge (see powerpoint presentation for overview of this research). I am also interested in how units larger than single words are important for fluency and efficiency in all types of language processing (for both first and second language).

In word recognition, I have expertise in an intriguing visual/cognition illusion called repetition blindness. I have shown how illusory words can be created by embedding word fragments in the visual stream, as in "pain grain avy" (leads to report of "gravy" (see, for example, my paper with Alison Morris, in pdf. I have used repetition blindness and the same/difference task to investigate how diacritic letters are represented in Turkish. With German colleagues Martin Heil and Michael Niedeggen I have used this technique to explore consciousness (see our paper in Neuroreport). We conclude that what viewers perceive is more important for subsequent brain states and processing than what is actually in the visual input.

In my cross-cultural research, I am the originator (with Ayse Aycicegi) of the Personality-Culture Clash hypothesis. We propose that mental health is facilitated by having a personality in tune with cultural values.

Speaking engagements: I am available to speak on Advertising to Bilingual populations.


Conferences & Colloquia, 2006-2007

Event 

Location 

Date 

Topic 

Add'l Info

The Second Biennial Conference on Cognitive Science
St. Petersburg, Russia
June 9-13 2006
Reactions to emotional language in English-Russian bilingual speakers
Symposium description
Cognitive Neuroscience Society
New York
May 2007
Psychophysiological Studies of Emotional Arousal to Bilingual
Speakers' First and Second Languages
Staroselsky, Vasilyeva, Rukovets, Choate
Association for Psychological Science
Washington DC
May 26
Preferring to lie in L1 vs L2: Is emotionality or proficiency more important? N. Sanchez, B.Ventura, C. Angun, A. Aycicegi-Dinn
University of Kent Workshop on Bilingualism and Emotion
Canterbury
May 26-27
When is the first language more emotional? See paper
Psychonomic Society
Long Beach
Nov 2007
"Stop That" more arousing in L1, "I love you" in L2.  

Prior Conferences


MISC

Why so slow? Video of Virginia Valian's lecture at MIT