About the Lab
Student Activities
Student Activities
The Mills Laboratory of Psychology and Health is a psychophysiology laboratory housed in the Department of Psychology at Mills College. It was built in 2007 and designed in collaboration with Dr. Bachen and Mills campus architect, Karen Fiene.
A psychophysiology laboratory provides a scientific environment to support a diverse body of res
The Mills Laboratory of Psychology and Health is a psychophysiology laboratory housed in the Department of Psychology at Mills College. It was built in 2007 and designed in collaboration with Dr. Bachen and Mills campus architect, Karen Fiene.
A psychophysiology laboratory provides a scientific environment to support a diverse body of research on mind-body connections. Questions concerning mind-body connections are at the forefront of scientific research in the field of psychology.
Click this link to see students working in the lab.
Student Activities
Student Activities
Student Activities
Students who are research assistants in the lab assist with the following types of activities: help create and design research surveys, conduct health screens to determine eligibility for taking part in the laboratory visits, run lab visits, collect and process physiological data, analyze data using SPSS software, conduct literature revie
Students who are research assistants in the lab assist with the following types of activities: help create and design research surveys, conduct health screens to determine eligibility for taking part in the laboratory visits, run lab visits, collect and process physiological data, analyze data using SPSS software, conduct literature reviews, and help to prepare conference presentations. Students also learn about research confidentiality and necessary steps to protect participant confidentiality, and how to work as part of a research team and develop a professional demeanor. Several students receive Directed Research credit for their training and involvement in this research, as well as authorship on conference presentations. They are learning and carrying out technical activities in the lab that I learned in graduate school.
Many students who work in the Laboratory of Psychology and Health apply to graduate school after they obtain their bachelor’s degree at Mills. Some do this right away and others take time off from school to work and continue to develop their interests. Four recent graduates who trained in the lab became research assistants or project coordinators in research programs at the University of California, San Francisco/SFVA (smoking cessation and PTSD projects) prior to pursuing their graduate studies.
RAs Today
Student Activities
RAs Today
The following is a partial list of current and former research assistants who worked in the lab and are pursuing or have completed their graduate degrees in psychology or related fields:
Anne Preziosa, current RA completing a degree in Psychology at Mills and applying to doctoral programs in Organizational Psychology
Thalia Cruzat, B.A., c
The following is a partial list of current and former research assistants who worked in the lab and are pursuing or have completed their graduate degrees in psychology or related fields:
Anne Preziosa, current RA completing a degree in Psychology at Mills and applying to doctoral programs in Organizational Psychology
Thalia Cruzat, B.A., current RA completing the Post-bac Pre-med Program at Mills and applying to medical school
Rafaella Hovick, B.A., applying to graduate programs in psychology
Quintin Crownover, PsyD candidate in Clinical Psychology, Wright Institute; now on clinical internship at the University of Texas at Austin
Lauren Ross, Ph.D. candidate, joint Social Neuroscience Program, University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon Universities
Kiya Komaiko, B.A., completing Pre-health/Pre-med Program at UC Berkeley
Jody Ernst, Ph.D. in Behavioral Genetics, University of Texas at Austin
Amanda Bryan, Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, University of Arizona
Teresa Igaz, Ph.D. in Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara
Stephanie Young, Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, Palo Alto University
Nancy Norris, FNP, M.S. in Nursing, School of Nursing, UCSF
Erin Connolly, M.A. in Organizational Development, USF
Tara Metcalf, M.A. in Drama Therapy, California Institute of Integral Studies
Rebecca Scheer, M.S. in Marriage and Family Therapy, Northwestern University
Julia Spencer, B.S., Psychology Post Bac Program, UC Berkeley
Miriam Sydney, MBA, Mills College
Frishta Sharifi, MFT, Cal State East By
Saundra Howard, B.A., applied to Public Health Programs
Laura Combs, B.A. Housing Stability Coordinator, Hamilton Families, San Francisco
Additional Information
What kinds of research can be conducted in a psychophysiology lab?
Psychophysiology laboratories are versatile and generate important and often cutting-edge research findings in the areas of psychology, biology, and medicine. In such labs, it is possible to explore associations between psychosocial and physiological domains. There are many advantages to experimental psychophysiology labs, including the ability to control for extraneous factors (e.g., physical activity) that may affect biological outcomes of interest and the use of standardized laboratory tasks or stressors. These tasks approximate the level of stress or daily hassles that most people experience in their lives. The following list is a very small sampling of the type of research findings generated from psychophysiology laboratories.
- Stress, including brief laboratory stress, causes many changes in the body. It increases heart rate, blood pressure, stress hormones, and cholesterol levels, and also alters immune function. In acute stress, some of these changes can be very rapid, occurring within a few minutes of the stressor onset. Although most changes return to resting baseline fairly quickly, some changes can persist for longer periods of time, even up to 24 hours later. Some studies find that people who tend to ruminate about stressful situations (i.e., dwell on negative feelings and aspects of their situation) take longer to ‘recover’, i.e., return to resting levels after exposure to a brief mental stressor.
- People differ greatly in the magnitude of their physiological responses to brief laboratory stress, and these differences may have important implications for health, from risk for colds to developing heart disease. For example, research has shown that non-human primates that demonstrate higher heart rate and blood pressure reactivity to chronic social stress develop more atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries). Being on a high-fat diet exacerbates this finding. Being on a low-fat diet reduces this effect, but does not eliminate it.
- People who have been exposed to trauma and have posttraumatic stress disorder often exhibit greater sympathetic (fight-or-flight) activation but a blunted activity of the HPA-axis and cortisol response.
