Psychological Sciences at Rice University

The Department of Psychological Science's undergraduate program offers the core preparation found across the nation’s leading graduate schools of psychology, combined with advanced courses and research opportunities offered by the nation's leading scholars and teachers in psychological science. Programs of study may be tailored to graduate school and future careers in several major fields of psychology, as well as in medicine, law, business, technology, or education.

An important feature of our doctoral program is its strong research orientation. Graduate students are expected to spend most of their time actively engaged in research and are expected to acquire a high level of research and statistical competence. Faculty research interests and PhD major concentrations for graduate students include: 

• Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience: understanding the psychology and neuroscience behind basic mental activities (e.g., perceiving, attending, remembering) and higher forms of behavior (e.g., memory, language, social cognition, emotion, health);
• Health Psychology and Behavioral Medicine Research: understanding how behaviors, cognitions, and emotions impact mental and physical health; designing and testing evidence based interventions to reduce health risk and improve quality of life; examining biological factors underlying risk, resilience, and mechanisms of change;
• Human-Computer Interaction and Human Factors: understanding interactions between humans and other elements of a physical system, and the application of theories, principles, data, and other methods of design that optimize human well-being and overall system performance and usability;
• Industrial-Organizational Psychology: understanding human behavior in organizational and work situations, addressing research problems such as motivation at work, the aging workforce, discrimination in the workplace, job performance, and team training;
• Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology: understanding specialized skills related to appropriate and innovative study design; statistical modeling and analysis; and interpretation of psychological measures, experiments, and interventions