Social Psychology: Purdue has one of the world’s leading training programs in social psychology. Faculty in the program are world-renowned experts in the core areas of social psychology including (1) prejudice and discrimination, (2) intergroup and group processes, (3) close relationships, and (4) self and identity, as well as a commitment to methodological rigor and best practices. Within the social psychology program, faculty also have research interests in several cross-disciplinary topics, including diversity and inclusion, individual differences, and maladaptive behavior and social relationships. Social psychology faculty who study diversity and inclusion focus on a broad range of topics, from stereotyping and prejudice to gender issues and beyond. Faculty in the program who focus on individual differences study the rewards and challenges of close relationships, differences in person-thing orientation, and self-presentation in interpersonal relationships. Maladaptive behavior research spans issues from interpersonal violence to discrimination. Finally, because social relationships play such an important role in social psychology, research on this topic explores a wide range of issues related to how individuals interact with each other and the social processes at play.
Neuroscience and Behavior: Faculty in the Neuroscience and Behavior area research a variety of animal and human behavior models to study brain-behavior relationships using state-of-the art techniques and technologies. Problems studied by the neuroscience and behavior area include molecular and genetic determinants of behavior, physiological bases of motivated behaviors, neural and hormonal bases of learning and memory, physiological and genetic bases of psychiatric disorders, and the underlying neural mechanisms of cognitive processing and social interaction. The current faculty have ongoing research interests in cognition, including associative learning, reward processing, decision-making, selective attention, and problem solving, as well as clinical phenomena, including alcohol use disorder, Alzheimer’s disease, eating disorders and obesity, depression, anxiety, Parkinson’s disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, and autism spectrum and attention deficit disorders. In addition to cognitive and clinical neuroscientists, the area also welcomes social neuroscientist applicants. Multiple faculty in this area frequently use the Purdue MRI Facility (https://www.purdue.edu/mri/), which houses three research-dedicated MRI systems.
Industrial-Organizational Psychology: Purdue conferred its first degree in I-O Psychology in 1939. It is one of the oldest programs and is counted among the highest-ranked I-O programs in the world (tinyurl.com/purdueio). The program has graduated more PhD students and produced more SIOP Fellows than any other I-O program and receives strong support from alumni. The current I-O faculty have a wide range of research interests, many of which center around the psychological experiences of people at work, well-being, and advanced quantitative and/or data-intensive approaches to these topics. The program attracts top graduate students from around the world. Our group has ongoing collaborations with the OBHR program at Purdue’s Daniels School of Management and with other areas within the Department of Psychological Sciences (Cognitive Psychology and Social Psychology).