Health Psychology Institute

• Program Details

• Schedule

• Faculty

• Return to Psychology Institute Home

Program Details:

July 11 - 13, 2012

PSY 390 (1096)

The Health Psychology Institute will be held at the Joel and Linda Abromson Community Education Center on USM's Portland Campus. Presentations are held in the 500 seat, climate-controlled Hannaford Lecture Hall. The institutes are led by USM Psychology Professor William Gayton, Ph.D. During the past 20 years, Professor Gayton has been instrumental in the creation, promotion, and execution of these intense and fascinating educational programs.

The institutes consist of three-day intensive classes (Wednesday-Friday) for college students seeking academic credit or for community professionals seeking certification and professional development opportunities. The institutes offer CEU's for teachers requiring recertification, as well as for participants seeking Board of Psychology or Social Work CEU's.

The educational focus of these unique programs is to bring together a tremendous team of academic experts to facilitate a discussion of theory and practice. The institutes are intended to appeal to mental health practitioners, health care professionals, physicians, physical therapists, nursing students, psychologists, counselors, social workers, human service workers, coaches, athletic directors, and athletes.

Open to all majors, no prerequisites.

Return to top

Schedule:

Wednesday, July 11th


Thursday, July 12th

Friday, July 13th

Return to top

Faculty

Bruce Compas
William F. Gayton
Janice Kiecolt-Glaser
Deborah Taylor
Elizabeth Vella
Everett L. Worthington, Jr.

• Bruce Compas, Ph.D.,is the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Psychology and Human Development, co-director of clinical psychology training, and director of psycho-Oncology at the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. His research is focused on processes of coping and self-regulation in response to stress and adversity in children, adolescents, and adults. He is specifically interested in the relationships of stress, coping, and self-regulation with both physical health/illness and psychopathology, and the development of interventions to enhance the ways that individuals and families cope with stress. His research involves both laboratory methods to study basic behavioral and biological processes, and field research to understand self-regulation and coping in the context of psychopathology and physical illness. Current studies include (a) testing a family cognitive-behavioral preventive intervention for children and adolescents coping with the effects of parental depression; (b) communication, coping, and adjustment in pediatric cancer patients and their parents; (c) neuropsychological effects of chemotherapy in pediatric cancer patients; (d) psychological and biological responses to stress among mothers and daughters coping with risk for breast cancer; (e) psychological, social, and biological processes in the course of recurrent pain in children and adolescents, and (f) stress and episodes of pain in children with sickle cell disease.

• Janice Kiecolt-Glaser holds the S. Robert Davis Chair of Medicine in The Ohio State University College of Medicine; she also holds the title of Distinguished University Professor. She is a member of the OSU Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research as well as Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology. Most notable among her honors is her membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.  In addition, she is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as the American Psychological Association; she received an Award for Outstanding Contributions to Health Psychology from the American Psychological Association's Division of Health Psychology, as well as the Developmental Health Psychology Award from the Divisions of Health Psychology and Adult Development and Aging. She is the past President of the Division of Health Psychology. The Psychoneuroimmunology Research Society gave her the Norman Cousins Award in 1998.  She is listed in the Institute for Scientific Information ISIHighlyCited.com (among the world's most highly cited authors, a group comprising less than one half of one percent of all publishing researchers). She is currently a member of the NIH MESH study section and she has served on the editorial boards of 10 professional journals including the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Psychosomatic Medicine, and Health Psychology.  Her research has been supported by a series of grants from the National Institutes of Health, including a MERIT award, as well as a Research Career Development Award, and she is currently a PI on NIH grants from the NCI  and NIA.  In 2008, she received The Ohio State University's highest honor for scholars, appointment as a Distinguished University Professor, a title awarded to only ~50 faculty members since 1985. Working in the area of psychoneuroimmunology, she has authored  more than 200 articles, chapters, and books, most in collaboration with Dr. Ronald Glaser.  Their studies have demonstrated important health consequences of stress, including slower wound healing and impaired vaccine responses; they have also shown that chronic stress substantially accelerates age-related changes in inflammation which is linked to some cancers, cardiovascular disease, type II diabetes, osteoporosis, arthritis, and frailty and function decline.  In addition, their programmatic work has focused on how personal relationships influence immune and endocrine function, and health.

• Deborah Taylor, Ph.D., received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology with a subspecialty in health psychology from the University of Kansas in 1985, and subsequently completed a postdoctoral internship at Ohio State University Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship in chronic and cancer pain, she returned to Ohio State University Hospital to direct a psychology consultation service for hospitalized medical patients. A native Mainer and a graduate of the University of Southern Maine, Taylor was very pleased to return to her home state in 1992 to join the faculty of the Central Maine Medical Center Family Practice Residency Program where she serves as the director of Behavioral medicine to primary care physician trainees, and continues to pursue her special interest in providing clinical care to patients with medical illness and/or chronic pain conditions. Taylor’s research interests focus on the psychological impact of illness, pain, and disability on the patient and their family/support system.

• Elizabeth Vella, Ph.D., received her Ph.D. in Psychological Science form Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 2005 and subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Cardiovascular Behavioral Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh in 2007. She is currently and Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Southern Maine. Her research interests include the psychophysiology of emotion and personality, with an emphasis on measures of autonomic nervous system activity in relation to health and disease; psychosocial factors and cardiovascular risk, and physiological mechanisms that may explain these associations; and the influences of trait hostility and anger management style on cardiovascular reactivity/poor recovery to stress in the etiology of cardiovascular disease. Her research has appeared in some of the top journals in health psychology including the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, Health Psychology and the International Journal of Psychophysiology. Dr. Vella is currently in the process of establishing her research programs in health psychology here at USM to study biopsychosocial models in stress and coping. Her current projects include serotonergic enhancement in hostile adults to reduce resting blood pressure and heart rate levels; the interrelationships between trait measures of hostility and daily reports of hostile moods and social strain; stress reduction in breast cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy; and the utility of emotion disposition measures in predicting cardiovascular responses to mood induction.

• Everett L. Worthington, Jr., is Professor of Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University. He has written over 25 books and 300 articles and chapters, and this last year won the Dorothy Booz Black Counseling Health Psychology Award from the American Psychological Association Division 17 (Society for Counseling Psychology). He has won his university's top award for excellence in research, teaching, and service. As a licensed Clinical Psychologist in Virginia, he has developed and done clinical research in support of one of the leading interventions in forgiveness and also in couple enrichment.

• William F. Gayton Ph.D. is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Southern Maine. During the past 26 years, he has developed four Psychology Institutes sponsored by USM Summer Session dealing with Sport Psychology, Health Psychology, Adult Psychopathology and Child Psychopathology. The Institutes provide USM students and professionals in the community an opportunity to hear nationally known speakers discuss their practice and research.

Return to top