Karen Haas Putnam
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Karen Haas Putnam
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 NEWS: Karen is awarded Social and Behavioral Sciences Pre-Doc research award! (11-14-2006) Karen presents poster at Society of Biological Psychiatry Meeting 2007 I am a graduate student in the Clinical Psychology doctoral program, Neuropsychology track. My involvement in psychological research at the U of A began prior to my admission to the program, in Dr. Glisky’s Amnesia & Cognition lab, studying aging and memory in the project: Ehancing Learning in Memory Impaired Individuals: Neuroanatomical correlates of learning and memory before and after rehabilitation. I have also collaborated with Lee Ryan and Lynn Nadel, as a member of the Cognition & Neuroimaging lab, examining the neuroanatomical correlation of episodic and semantic memory systems as measured by fMRI. We published two articles as a result of this work, one in Behavioral and Brain Science entitled Episodic Memory: Its about time and Space and a follow up study in Hippocampus entitled Hippocampal complex and retrieval of recent and very remote autobiographical memories: evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging in neurologically intact people. For my master’s thesis, Fighter Pilots in Emergency Situations: Cognitive and Physiological Response to Engine Fire, I collaborated with Lynn Nadel and Jake Jacobs and the Anxiety Research Group (ARG). This work lead to the creation of the small neuroendocrine lab within ARG. Gary Wenk and Douglas Granger (PSU, Director of the Behavioral Endocrinology Lab) significantly contributed to the project, by providing access to their chemistry laboratories, equipment, resources, and instruction. Thanks to them, I was able to measure salivary cortisol for all of the study participants and I was able to complete all of the assays in house – an exciting development for biochemistry geeks like me. Teaching has always been a pleasure for me, and my first official teaching position was at Ascension Catholic School in Indiatlantic, FL where I served as the science teacher (laboratory and classroom) for the 6th and 7th grades. In the summer, I was part of the teaching consortium at Florida Institute of Technology’s Tropical Ecology for Gifted High School Students, a three-week summer camp attended by outstanding students from 5 southern states. As a graduate student, I have been s student instructor and/or grader at the U of A for the following classes: Human Sexuality, Psychology of Gender, Death and Dying, Research Methods, and Statistics. I completed my clinical externship at the SAVAHCS in Tucson, AZ, with George Gafner as my mentor. This was a very exciting time, to implement the skills learned in the classroom and to develop and improve existing programs for veterans with various mental health and social concerns. George is an outstanding instructor and together we created three new groups: Women Veterans with PTSD, a Depression Group, and a Grief and Loss Support Group. I was also privileged to lead and participate as a student instructor in the following groups: Anger Management, WWII and Korean War Support Group, and PTSD Family Support Group. Currently, I am a member of Anouk Scheres’ Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory. My dissertation project is Self-Control and Motivation in Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults. The purpose of my research is to better understand how self-control and motivation play a role in impulsive behavior. Impulsive behavior is often characterized by clinicians in observations such as “acts before (s)he thinks”, “acts without considering future consequences of the behavior”, “cannot wait”, and “seeks immediate gratification”. As illustrated by these behavioral descriptions, both the ability to show self-control (e.g., considering future consequences before acting), and motivational processes such as the ability to wait for positive outcomes (delaying gratification) play a role in impulsive behavior. Levels of impulsivity generally decrease with age, with young children behaving in a more impulsive way, and adolescents and young adults gradually behaving less impulsively. Age-inappropriate levels of impulsivity are thought to play a role in a number of (child) behavioral disorders, for example Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (AD/HD), Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD), and Conduct Disorder (CD). Symptoms of impulsivity in AD/HD, ODD, and CD have been associated with poor self-control, and also with an unusual sensitivity to rewards. Although we know that self-control and motivation develop with age and play a key role in several clinical conditions involving poor impulse control, little is known about the interaction between these two fundamental processes. Do children with AD/HD have a particularly hard time showing self-control when rewards are at stake, or does their deficit in self-control exist independent of motivational factors? The aim of my dissertation project is to study the interaction between self-control and motivation, in order to further understanding of how the interaction between these processes may be related to impulsivity. |
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