Psychologists Conduct Research

DR. LINDA M. BARTOSHUK
is a psychophysics psychologist, researcher, and university professor.

Dr. Bartoshuk is a psychologist and professor in the Ear, Nose, and Throat section of the surgery department at the Yale University School of Medicine. She studies taste and the genetics of taste. At Yale, she conducted research on the genetic variation in people's ability to taste a particular bitter chemical, called 6-n-propylthiouracil, or PROP, and how variation in tasting shapes health. She and others who study taste have made a number of discoveries about the ability to taste PROP. For example, they have learned that there are gender and race differences in taste perception and that taste patterns affect the foods people choose, and probably, as a result, their health.

Linda M. Bartoshuk, PhD, earned her BA at Carleton College. Although she began her college career as an astronomy major, in her astronomy classes, when she studied people's abilities to compare the brightness of various stars, she became interested in people's senses. She switched her major to psychology.

After receiving her PhD from Brown University, she worked at the Natick Army Research labs (where research related to food for military personnel is done) and then went to the Pierce Foundation and Yale University in New Haven, CT.

Says Dr. Bartoshuk, “Psychology contributes to health in significant ways. As an academic working in a medical school, my collaboration with physicians has allowed me to use psychophysics to quantify symptoms, thereby advancing the understanding of disorders in my field (taste/oral pain) and promoting patient well-being. Psychology and the science supporting it have never been more relevant to the world around us.”

Dr. Bartoshuk has received a variety of research awards and has served in many leadership positions in psychology. She has also served on the American Psychological Association (APA) Board of Scientific Affairs; presented lectures as an APA Distinguished Scientist Lecturer; and served as president of the Association for Chemoreception Sciences (AChemS), the Eastern Psychological Association, and two divisions of APA (The Society for General Psychology; Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology). She was elected to membership in the Society of Experimental Psychology, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences, and she received the AChemS Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Chemical Senses.

Dr. Bartoshuk spends a typical workday at her computer and with patients. She and her students design experiments to study the sense of taste, run the experiments, and then analyze the data. She serves as a subject in experiments, as she never does an experiment on another person that has not been done on her first.

Dr. Bartoshuk says that to be a psychologist you need to have a good background in mathematics and science and you need to observe the world around you and yourself. “Behavior is fascinating. Psychology includes many subspecialties. The more you learn about them, the easier it will be to pick an area that will use your skills and give you great satisfaction.”

“I love being a psychologist. We study the behavior we see, but we know how to look beneath the surface to explore mechanisms. We are sophisticated and tolerant thinkers, yet we recognize nonsense. We have impact on the lives of real people, and we care about them. To me, there is no better way to spend one's life. . . . I feel very lucky to be able to do the work that I love. The best advice that I ever gave myself was to go with my heart!”

Cool careers in science: Meet Linda Bartoshuk. Scientific American Frontiers Archives Fall 1990 to Spring 2000. Retrieved October 14, 2003, from http://www.pbs.org/safarchive/5_cool/53c_bartoshuk.html

Dr. Robert Rescorla became a psychologist because he likes puzzles. “You see a phenomenon and try to understand it,” he says. “I like the logic of designing an experiment, developing a hypothesis, and testing your ideas.” Dr. Rescorla studies his favorite phenomenon, learning, at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs undergraduate studies in psychology and is Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in Psychology. Throughout his career, he has discovered and defined the ways that animals (including humans) learn, especially by the power of association.

His love of research was sparked at Swarthmore College, where one professor encouraged students to conduct their own experiments in visual perception. Recalls Dr. Rescorla, “It was exciting to be the first person in the world to know the answer to something.”

After graduating in 1962, he earned a PhD in psychology in 1966 at the University of Pennsylvania. Inspired by a book by one of the field's early researchers, Dr. Rescorla and Dr. Richard Solomon embarked on a classic series of experiments on the mechanisms of learned fear. Their findings have helped to shape effective therapies for treating phobia and other anxiety disorders.

Dr. Rescorla began his teaching career at Yale University. In 1981, he returned to the University of Pennsylvania, where in 1986 he was appointed the James M. Skinner Professor of Science. He studies not only how animals and humans learn that one stimulus signals another, but also how they learn that this relationship no longer holds. Dr. Rescorla also figured out how to measure the strength of learning, the key to documenting his observations.

This lifelong researcher has seen his work help to relieve human suffering. Armed with insights into associative learning, clinical psychologists have developed ways to “extinguish” the phobias that develop when people learn to fear a stimulus because it signals a painful experience.

Dr. Rescorla encourages more undergraduate research because, as he learned, “Once you do it, you're hooked.” At U Penn, he has chaired the psychology department and been dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He was elected to the Society of Experimental Psychologists in 1975 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 1985. One of his most prized honors is the 1999 Ira Abrams Distinguished Teaching Award of the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn.

Dr. Rescorla has served as president of the Division of Experimental Psychology of the American Psychological Association, the Psychology Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Eastern Psychological Association.

For students considering psychology, he recommends a broad liberal-arts education and adds, “Take the psychology intro course, and then sample broadly around it so you can find out what psychology is, whether it's right for you, and what particular topic within it grabs you.”

Dr. Rescorla also urges students to study more biology and math. “Psychology is increasingly going to have a biological component—not just in the laboratory but in the applied world, for various therapies. Plus, you will need more of a quantitative background.”

DR. STANLEY SUE
is a clinical psychologist, a researcher, and a university professor.

I'm a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis. Unlike psychologists who specialize in a technique or a theory, I specialize in a population. Much of my work focuses on Asian American clients, who often have special needs, especially if they are immigrants from the old country.

I went to an all-boys technical high school wanting to be a television repairman. Within a year, I became disinterested in electronics and woodworking, so I switched schools and tried to prepare myself for college. Along the way, I decided I wanted to become a clinical psychologist even though I was quite naive and didn't know what a clinical psychologist actually did. But I remember always watching a television program called The Eleventh Hour that featured both a psychiatrist and a psychologist, and thinking that this is what I wanted to do.

I told my father that I was interested in psychology, particularly clinical psychology. He's Chinese from the old country and couldn't understand what a psychologist does and how one could make a living at it. But I persisted and went to the University of Oregon to major in psychology and then to the University of California at Los Angeles for graduate work. Since then, my three brothers have gone into psychology. The oldest brother even married a psychologist!

At our research center, we're conducting about 20 projects. One is a major study of the rates of mental illness among Chinese people in the United States. Little is known about Asian Americans in this regard. Many people have been saying that Chinese and other Asian Americans don't have many mental health problems. But we know that they have problems just like any other group of people, although there are some differences in the distribution of disorders.

What we have found generally, however, is that Asian Americans tend to underutilize mental health services and that those who do use the services are very disturbed. This means that Asian American people with mild disturbances tend not to come in until their problems are serious.

We're also trying to determine the factors related to mental disturbances among some Chinese people in this country and the factors that seem to insulate others in this population from mental problems. Several researchers at the center are also studying parent–child conflicts in Asian American families to see if the conflicts are different from those affecting other ethnic families and to identify ways to resolve the conflicts. Other investigators are looking at husband–wife problems to ascertain if they're unique because of cultural differences. One researcher has developed a scale that measures “loss of face,” which is a particularly important concept for people of Asian descent; fear of losing face affects how they behave. We are also going to look at how much mental health services cost for each ethnic group in our county.

We've seen that Asian Americans tend to drop out of treatment when they see therapists who are not ethnically similar, particularly if the patient has limited proficiency in English. It is one of the reasons we need to diversify the work force. If you're an Asian American who is comfortable in the American culture, you can see a Caucasian therapist, you can see an African American, you can see any therapist. But if you're very traditional or you've just come from overseas, you should have the option of seeing an Asian American therapist.

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