Lab Director

Photo of Prof. Catherine Caldwell-Harris

Name: Catherine Caldwell-Harris, Ph.D.

Address: 64 Cummington St., Boston, MA 02215 (Deptment of Psychology & Brain Science @ Boston University)

Office: Rm 123/ Lab: Rms 128-129

 

Contact Information

Email: charris@bu.edu

Phone: (617) 353-2856

Profiles: Academia, Google Scholar, ResearchGate

Affiliations: CISS, BU Linguistics Department, CMAC, Just Horizons

 

Background: 

I received my B.A. in Psychology from Harvard University (1985) and my PhD in Cognitive Science and Psychology from UC San Diego (1985-1991). I have been a faculty member at BU since 1991.

My research interests encompass diverse aspects of language processing, including second language acquisition, emotional aspects of language, and word recognition.  An intriguing visual/cognition illusion called repetition blindness is one of my areas of expertise.

I am the first researcher to document that emotion words elicit larger skin conductance responses in a first language than in a second. In addition to psycholinguistics, I also have expertise in cross-cultural psychology. I am the originator (with Ayse Aycicegi) of the Personality Culture Clash Hypothesis which proposes that mental health is facilitated by having a personality in tune with cultural values.

My most recent projects include understanding religious and scientific beliefs among young adults in Turkey, integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) to manage Autism in Children, and analyzing the written language of bloggers with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Psychology classes I currently teach include: cross-cultural psychology, child development, and public policy. Past coursework I have taught comprised cognitive science, psycholinguistics, cognitive development, developmental psychology, first and second language acquisition, individual differences, and intellectual history of the 20th century.

 

My History: 

I was trained at UC San Diego, 1985-1991, where I studied under the guidance of Elizabeth Bates, Jeffrey Elman, David Rumelhart, Rama Ramachandran, Ronald Langacker, Patricia Churchland and (via CMU) Brian MacWhinney and Jay McClelland (and of course many other wonderful teachers and scholars). I have been a faculty member at BU since 1991.

My research interests are broad, encompassing diverse aspects of language processing, including second language acquisition, emotional aspects of language, and word recognition. I am the first researcher to document that emotion words elicit larger skin conductance responses in a first language than in a second (see paper in Applied Psycholinguistics PDF). I am currently studying emotional reactivity in the U.S. for speakers who grew up speaking Russian, Mandarin, or Spanish, as well as English native speakers who learned Russian as a foreign language (see PowerPoint presentation for an overview of this research and 2009 journal article on lying in native vs. foreign language). See also a recent PowerPoint which discusses the role of motivation in second language acquisition. I am also interested in how units larger than single words are important for fluency and efficiency in all types of language processing  (see paper).

In word recognition, I have expertise in an intriguing visual/cognition illusion called repetition blindness. I have shown how illusory words can be created by embedding word fragments in the visual stream, as in “pain grain avy” (leads to report of “gravy” (see, for example, my paper with Alison Morris, in PDF). I have used repetition blindness and the same/difference task to investigate how diacritic letters are represented in Turkish. With German colleagues Martin Heil and Michael Niedeggen, I have used this technique to explore consciousness (see our paper in Neuroreport). We conclude that what viewers perceive is more important for subsequent brain states and processing than what is actually in the visual input. A new model of repetition blindness and orthographic priming appeared in 2009 in the journal Cognitive Psychology.

In my cross-cultural research, I am the originator (with Ayse Aycicegi) of the Personality-Culture Clash hypothesis. We propose that mental health is facilitated when personality is in tune with cultural values.

 

Courses: 

Fall 2025:

  • PS 504 – Trends in Contemporary Psychology: Neurodiversity

Spring 2026:

  • PS 326 – Experimental Psychology: Social
  • PS 560 – Cross-Cultural Psychology