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Burghardt honored by Animal Behavior Society

August 8, 2024 by Logan Judy

Animal behavior captivated Gordon Burghardt as a boy, and over more than half a century at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, his interdisciplinary research advanced ethology in areas including animal play, social behavior, communication, reptile behavior, enrichment, and animal cognitive abilities. 

The Animal Behavior Society (ABS) recognized his outstanding lifetime achievement by awarding Burghardt the 2024 Distinguished Animal Behaviorist Award during its annual meeting in late June.

Interest to Interdisciplinary Investigation

During his childhood in Wisconsin, Burghardt collected snakes. He also developed an interest in chemistry, and that was his major when he entered the University of Chicago in 1959. Despite his curiosity about animals, Burghardt said, “I was always told you couldn’t make a career, support a family, studying biology at that time.”

A class on animal behavior with Eckhard Hess led Burghardt to major in biopsychology, earning his PhD in 1966. He was drawn to UT by the head of the Department of Psychology, William S. Verplanck, who had worked with B.F. Skinner and other leading psychologists. 

“The faculty were bright and young and growing, and they had a lot of people in experimental psychology working with animals,” Burghardt said. “I came, and I’ve been able to develop my own programs and courses, and had many grad students doing research.”

He founded a UT interdisciplinary Life Sciences Graduate Program in Ethology in 1981, one of several designed to break down departmental silos. 

Although Burghardt started as an assistant professor in the Department of  Psychology in 1968, he was always involved with the Department of Zoology and its graduate students. He noted the interdepartmental cooperation and collegial, supportive relationships within and between departments. “That’s developed even more now,” he said, pointing to the number of joint appointments. “I was the first one,” he said, also becoming a professor in the Department of Zoology in 1995 (now the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, or EEB).

Burghardt has worked with chemists, too, to research snakes’ chemical senses. He became one of the first editorial board members of The Journal of Chemical Ecology, one of numerous publications on which he has worked. He has served in leadership positions with multiple professional organizations too, including ABS and the American Psychological Association.

Burghardt’s excitement is evident when he talks about the first time he observed neonate snakes responding to prey chemicals, and he’s still publishing research on snake chemoreception.

Studying Play

Shortly after Burghardt arrived at UT, the university forged a relationship with the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for research on black bears, which were experiencing troubling encounters with tourists.

In 1970, two cubs found in the Smokies without their mother spent about seven weeks at Burghardt’s Knoxville home, until an area was ready for them in the park. The experience gave him an unusual observation opportunity. 

“They were super playful,” Burghardt said. “They were the most playful animals that I’ve ever seen.” 

That opened a new area for research, and Burghardt not only developed a definition of play but with his colleagues was the first to definitively document play in fish, turtles, and other species.

In 2005, his book The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits (MIT Press) examined the origins and evolution of play, reviewing evidence from species ranging from human babies to lizards, sharks, octopus, and insects. He has contributed to several other books on the topic, and his research also is extensively cited in the 2024 book Kingdom of Play: What Ball-bouncing Octopuses, Belly-flopping Monkeys, and Mud-sliding Elephants Reveal about Life Itself, by David Toomey.

Serpents, Iguanas, and Other Reptiles

Burghardt’s fascination with snakes led to numerous studies, with subjects ranging from neonates to a two-headed rat snake named IM that lived for decades in his lab.

He also taught a course on the psychology of religion, when it was a joint course with the Department of Religious Studies. “Snakes are the most important animal in religions,” he said, pointing around his office in the Austin Peay Memorial Building to artifacts and books from several faiths.

A trip to Panama to look at snakes led to his research on social behavior of newly hatched iguanas, uncovering social complexity unheard of in reptiles. Burghardt was unable to attend the ABS ceremony in Ontario to receive his award because it conflicted with his attending a centennial symposium at Barro Colorado Island, part of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, where he and his students observed the iguanas. 

He and then-student Brian Bock served as scientific advisors on a British Broadcasting Corp. episode of Wildlife on One, “Iguanas, Living Like Dinosaurs,” narrated by David Attenborough. 

Burghardt and his colleagues also studied a Komodo dragon named Kraken at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and later a Komodo dragon at Zoo Knoxville, also featured in two documentary films on play.

He is co-author of the 2021 book The Secret Social Lives of Reptiles and editor on the second edition of Health and Welfare of Captive Reptiles.

“It was really important that the university supported and appreciated the kind of stuff that I was doing, even though it was not at all traditional in terms of what psychologists typically do,” he said. “My work, I think, has been pretty well recognized, as this award shows, so I was on to something.”

While Burghardt still serves on a couple committees of graduate students completing their dissertations, he notes that some of his former students are retiring.

“I just retired two years ago, but they’re not hanging on until 80, like I did,” he said. “Doing my research, what I wanted to do, keeps you younger.” 

“I really love the field of animal behavior and feel that I’m still able to make substantial contributions,” said Burghardt, who in addition to publishing his own research is founding editor of a new journal, Frontiers in Ethology.

By Amy Beth Miller

Psychology Faculty Honored with Awards for Diversity Leadership, Advising, Teaching, and Research Excellence

March 27, 2024 by Logan Judy

During the 2023 College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Convocation, several faculty in the Department of Psychology were honored for excellence in teaching, advising, research, and outreach. 

Kalynn Schulz, Assistant Professor

Diversity Leadership Award

Schulz is a remarkable scholar and educator whose actions on campus, regionally, and nationally, demonstrate an unwavering commitment to increasing academic representation of and support for scholars from historically marginalized groups.

Schulz’s diversity leadership is perhaps best exemplified by her developing and launching a pilot, cross-institutional research training program between the psychology departments at UT Knoxville and the historically Black university Tennessee State University called STARS (Scholarly Trainees Acquiring Research Skills). The program was designed to prepare TSU students for graduate-level research in psychology and support their transition into graduate school.

Schulz energized department-wide involvement of faculty and graduate students as research mentors, academic coaches, and peer mentors. TSU students from the first cohort are now thriving in graduate school.

Caglar Tas, Assistant Professor 

Excellence in Teaching Awards: Junior

Tas is an outstanding teacher and mentor who cares deeply about her students’ learning. She has taught courses at the undergraduate and graduate level, largely focused on research methods, which are some of the most difficult courses for psychology majors.

Tas demonstrates remarkable skill in engaging students and providing opportunities to apply the material learned in her courses. She encourages students to ask questions and actively participate in discussions. Students in her courses describe her as “an amazing professor,” “always accessible,” and “incredibly knowledgeable.” In addition to the courses she teaches, Tas is an extremely sought-after mentor at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Her incredible passion about teaching and mentoring truly energizes her students.

Kalynn Schulz, Assistant Professor

Faculty Advising Service Awards

Schulz exemplifies our college’s commitment to outstanding advising, implementing proactive and developmental advising models to build positive working relationships with students in support of their academic and career goals. Schulz is committed to supporting all students, and especially under-represented minority students. Students consistently express gratitude for her care and concern for their personal well-being in course evaluations.

One student noted, “Schulz thinks of the students who tend to be shy and embarrassed to ask questions in class and the students who may not be doing well and openly offers her most undivided attention and support to assure us that she will always be there to help. Schulz is more than a professor, teacher, instructor—she is a life mentor and an inspiration.” 

Chris Elledge, Associate Professor

Faculty Academic Outreach Award: Research & Creative Activity

Elledge’s research program is focused on bullied, socially marginalized, and anxious youth in the Knoxville community. He is a highly valued and accomplished associate professor and associate director of clinical training for the clinical psychology PhD program in the Department of Psychology. Elledge has particular interest in developing school-based interventions that can promote or enrich the peer relationships of at-risk youth. 

His commitment to serving children and families in the Knoxville community is exceptionally impressive. His Recess VOLs program pairs at-risk children with UT student mentors who visit children twice weekly for two academic semesters. The program has placed approximately 450 UT students with children across 10 Knox County elementary schools, serving approximately 300 youth.

Deborah Welsh, Professor 

Distinguished Research Career at UT

Deborah Welsh has been a faculty member in psychology at UT for more than 30 years and has an exceptional record of research scholarship and student research mentorship. Her research program has focused on understanding adolescent and emerging adults’ romantic relationships and their impact on functioning and has been funded by multi-year research grants from the National Institutes of Health.

Even while serving for 10 years as head of the psychology department, Welsh remained research active. She is passionate about research mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students. Her mentees have had successful careers and received elite postdoctoral fellowships and national awards. In recognition of her research accomplishments, Welsh has received numerous awards from UT Knoxville, including most recently a Chancellor’s Professorship, the 2023 College of Arts and Sciences College Marshal, and the 2023 Extraordinary Service to the University Award. 

Lamer and Team Read the Room for Angry Crowd Bias

February 27, 2024 by Logan Judy

Sarah Lamer’s research into the psychology of social biases found favor with an international audience this year, earning her a spot on the Association for Psychological Science (APS) roster of Rising Stars for 2024.

The APS is the leading international organization dedicated to advancing scientific psychology across disciplinary and geographic borders. Lamer, assistant professor in the UT Department of Psychology, is proud to be recognized among the top early-career colleagues in her field.

“This acknowledges the importance and rigor of my scientific work as well as the intensive mentorship model I take in my lab,” said Lamer. She works alongside her graduate students Darla Bonagura and Gillian Preston in her Social Perception and Cognition (SPĀC) lab.

“I work closely with my skilled team of graduate and undergraduate mentees to explore important and timely questions about why bias exists, where it originates, and why it is so fluently perpetuated,” she said. “This accolade recognizes the important work that we do as we discover answers to these critical questions.”

One of her research projects, “The Angry Crowd Bias: Social, Cognitive, and Perceptual Mechanisms,” is supported by a National Science Foundation grant that enables her to design, analyze, and conduct studies; mentor graduate students through the research process; share their work at professional conferences; and conduct workshops to share a love of science with students in the local Knoxville community.

The angry crowd bias is a psychological phenomenon people can experience when first exposed to faces that are hard to see or that have subtle expressions—notably among a “many faces in a crowd” situation. People can report that these faces look threatening, even when they are not.

“We know from a bulk of research that people are able to detect average information about a crowd with some accuracy,” said Lamer. “But perception is more complex than that. Accuracy and bias always work together in human perception.”

Lamer and her team hypothesized that this complex mix causes a tendency to perceive an unfamiliar crowd’s mood to be potentially dangerous.

“We focused on anger bias since crowds can pose a stronger threat to safety than an individual,” she said. “If a crowd is angry at you, you are at much higher risk than if an individual is angry at you. In other words, it is functional to be wary of a crowd.”

The team uses state-of-the-art methods and statistical tools to examine a viewer’s visual attention to faces—eye-tracking data, signal-detection methods, and drift-diffusion modeling—to track what people focus on while making emotional judgments. Then they assess what is accurate and what leads to bias.

“The approach makes it possible to track visual patterns—for example, which faces people look at first in a crowd, how long they look at each face, and whether they ignore anyone,” said Lamer. “All of which are likely to be affected by the race and gender of the faces themselves.”

This work is timely in relation to widespread protests in the US over the past several years and the divergent interpretations these crowds have received across public perception—potentially due in part to the racial and gender makeup of these assemblies.

“With this social backdrop in mind—and understanding that, according to event-forecasting models, social unrest is likely to increase in the future—this research was designed to identify the people whom negative crowd biases are most likely to affect, where these biased judgments come from, and how malleable they might be,” said Lamer. “We plan to complete data analysis on our current study by the end of the semester.”