American Psychological Foundation

Grants and opportunities

December 2011, Vol 42, No. 11

Print version: page 87

Student research on serious mental illness gets funding boost

The American Psychological Foundation (APF) has awarded research grants to three graduate students who are doing promising work in the area of serious mental illness. They are:

Anna Docherty, a fifth-year clinical psychology doctoral student at the University of Missouri, Columbia, who is using her $2,000 APF F.J. McGuigan Dissertation Award to study the ways in which emotional traits such as anhedonia — the inability to experience pleasure — may reveal a genetic vulnerability to schizophrenia. Docherty hopes her research will help develop more effective ways of managing schizophrenia symptoms.
Matthew Cohen, a doctoral student in the department of clinical and health psychology at the University of Florida, who will use his $2,500 APF Benton-Meier Scholarship to test Parkinson's disease patients' ability to move in response to environmental cues. His research has the potential to create new treatments for Parkinson's patients.
Ivy Tso, a fifth-year clinical psychology doctoral student at the University of Michigan, who will use her $2,500 APF Benton-Meier Scholarship to explore eye-gaze processing with people who have schizophrenia. Tso hopes to determine whether people with schizophrenia have abnormal gaze perception, and whether that irregularity could be related to their socio-emotional functioning.

APF's F.J. McGuigan Dissertation Award supports dissertation research on any aspect of mental functioning, including cognition, affect and motivation. The Benton-Meier Scholarships support graduate student research on neuropsychology.

The 2012 deadline for each is June 1.

For more information, visit APF Funding.

Many psychologists who are 70½ or older must take their minimum distribution from their IRAs. If you do not need your required distribution this year and want to avoid the taxes on it, you may donate it to APF or the charitable organization of your choice. For more information, contact Kimberly Palmer Rowsome at (202) 336-5622.