Behavioral Psychology (also called "Psychology of Learning" and "Behavior Analysis"): Research in this subfield within psychology is concerned with applied topics -- ones with social and/or clinical importance -- in which case the subfield is referred to as Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) or Behavior Modification. Research is also concerned with basic psychological phenomena within the experimental analysis of behavior.
Current projects:
- autism intervention (teaching children with autism to engage in functional, socially and clinically important, age-appropriate behavior)
- affective behavior of children with autism (teaching children with autism to respond to affective/emotion-laden events)
- independent engagement and schedule-following behavior of children with autism
- stimulus control of behavior (manipulating environmental events to modify human behavior)
- concept formation and stimulus equivalence (using conditional discriminations to form concepts or stimulus classes. This research area borrows mathematical properties of reflexivity, symmetry, and transitivity, and applies them to a behavioral/psychological relations)
Contact: Dr. Nidal Daou – nn07@aub.edu.lb
Cognitive Psychology
- Cognitive musicology (generation of novel motor-auditory sequences, cognitive theories of improvisation, multisensory integration in improvisational performance);
- Sense of agency (agency in joint human-robot actions, self-agency bias in joint actions, agency in altered gravity environments);
- Haptics (sense of agency in haptic virtual environments, implicit cross-modal mapping, bimanual manipulation).
Contact: Dr. Nadiya Slobodenyuk – ns74@aub.edu.lb
Neuroscience
- Creativity: (a) neural basis of creative thinking; (b) flow states; (c) evolutionary perspectives on creativity.
- Consciousness: (a) transient hypofrontality theory; (b) functional neuroanatomy of altered states; (c) altered states of consciousness as adaptation; (d) consciousness-altering rituals across cultures.
- Exercise and mental function: (a) transient hypofrontality theory; (b) neural basis of exercise-induced changes to emotion and cognition; (c) endocannabinoid system; (d) creativity.
Contact: Dr. Arne Dietrich – ad12@aub.edu.lb
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