About the Author
Michael W. Passer, Ph.D., coordinates the introductory psychology program at the University of Washington, which enrolls about 2,500 students per year, and also is the faculty coordinator of training for new teaching assistants (TAs). He received his bachelors degree from the University of Rochester and his PhD in Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a specialization in social psychology. Dr. Passer has been a faculty member at the University of Washington since 1977. A former Danforth Foundation Fellow and University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award finalist, Dr. Passer has had a career-long love of teaching. Each academic year he teaches introductory psychology twice and a required pre-major course in research methods. Dr. Passer developed and teaches a graduate course on the Teaching of Psychology, which prepares students for careers in the college classroom, and also has taught courses in social psychology and attribution theory. He has published more than 20 scientific articles and chapters, primarily in the areas of attribution, stress, and anxiety, and has taught the introductory psychology course for 20 years.
Ronald E. Smith, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology and Director of Clinical Psychology Training at the University of Washington, where he also has served as Area Head of the Social Psychology and Personality area. He received his bachelors degree from Marquette University and his PhD from Southern Illinois University, where he had dual specializations in clinical and physiological psychology. His major research interests are in anxiety, stress and coping, and in performance enhancement research and intervention. Dr. Smith is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. He received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute for his contributions to the field of mental health. He has published more than 160 scientific articles and book chapters in his areas of interest and has authored or co-authored 23 books on introductory psychology, human performance enhancement, and personality, including Introduction to Personality: Toward an Integration, with Walter Mischel and Yuichi Shoda (Wiley, 2004). An award-winning teacher, he has more than 15 years of experience in teaching the introductory psychology course.
My main field of research is Personality psychology. My research involves extending and clarifying current developments in personality psychology and critically assessing personality theories. I like to contribute to the theoretical frameworks that we use to develop accounts of personality through examining the underlying assumptions and drawing attention to critical issues relevant to all personality theories (e.g., the distinctions between description and explanations, and relations and the terms of relations). My research here also involves understanding what is meant by 'self' and 'identity', personality responses to serious health threats, the relation of personality to evolutionary psychology, personality and culture, neuroscience and personality, and the influence of attachment processes upon development. I also enjoy looking at the history of personality research (and of psychology generally). My own approach to personality favours a psychodynamic perspective and my central interests here include defense mechanisms (especially repression) and unconscious mental processes. My published research covers the neuroscientific debate surrounding Freudian dream theory, defense mechanisms, and whether repression can be a conscious process. The theory of Freudian repression has been attacked variously in the scientific literature but I have endeavoured to demonstrate that many critics of Freudian repression actually have very little understanding of what Freud had to say on the matter.
Our sense of vision is fundamental to our ability to interact with the world. Additionally, a great deal of our understanding of how the brain functions is based on our knowledge of how it processes visual information. The aim of my research is to further our understanding of the workings of the human visual system, with an emphasis on how various visual pathways interact at different levels in the brain. While I am interested in all aspects of visual processing, my research to date has mainly focused on motion, stereopsis and face processing
I joined the School in 2010 after 2.5 years working as a post-doctoral researcher in the Discipline of Paediatrics at the University of Adelaide. I currently teach into developmental psychology topics, cognitive neuroscience, sleep, memory and general psychology topics at an undergraduate level. I supervise Honours, Masters and PhD students in the School and across institutions. My research currently focuses on the importance of sleep for memory and cognitive performance, child mental health, critical periods of cognitive development, and the neural basis of cognitive functions. Together with Drs Hannah Keage and Owen Churches, I coordinate the new Cognitive Neuroscience laboratory which houses EEG and transcranial doppler facilities. I also collaborate with researchers at the Childrens Research Centre, University of Adelaide, at which I am an Affiliate Lecturer, and the Department of Neurology at the University of Rome (La Sapienza), Italy
