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The ASH Lab focuses on addiction and other types of behavior that have an impact on health. The lab’s research combines theories and methods from the fields of psychology and neuroscience.

AFI is a global and transnational platform where feminist scholars and activists engage in interdisciplinary collaborative knowledge production about Africa and its diaspora.

ARC encourages and supports research and scholarship on Africa and its Diaspora that will enhance the lives of persons of African descent in the United States and throughout the Diaspora.

The lab focuses on a cross-disciplinary approach to bilingual language processing using converging methodological tools. Experiments examine the way in which bilingual readers and speakers negotiate the presence of two languages in a single mind.

BiLD Lab studies the cognitive and neurocognitive processes related to language development, second language learning, and bilinguals’ use of two languages.

The Brain Injury and Plasticity Lab is engaged in multiple lines of research organized around understanding how neural systems adapt to injury and disease and the implications these brain changes have for patient outcomes.

The Castonguay Lab a is a highly collaborative group of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty members working to develop practice-oriented research on psychotherapeutic processes and outcomes.

One of sixteen Title VI Language Resource Centers funded by the U.S. Department of Education, CALPER works to strengthen and promote language learning at the advanced levels of proficiency.

CALS advances the study, teaching, and reading of American literature. Through its dual scholarly and public outreach mission, it generates vital new forms of community and intellectual exchange to position American literature as an important public space.

The Center for American Political Responsiveness was founded in 2011 as an interdisciplinary academic center that investigates questions of democratic governance and public policy.

CBDR is committed to bringing the histories of early Black organizing to digital life through innovative scholarship and collaborative partnerships. The center is home to the Colored Conventions Project, Douglass Day, and the Black Women’s Organizing Archive.

The Center for Democratic Deliberation was founded in 2006 as nonpartisan, interdisciplinary center for research on issues of rhetorical education, democratic deliberation, and forms of dissent.

The center works collaboratively with centers and institutes in the College of the Liberal Arts to support research, teaching, and programming that will advance Penn State’s expertise in global studies and international perspectives.

The Center for Global Workers’ Rights focuses on vulnerable workers in precarious sectors of the global economy. It publishes research reports, funds student projects, organizes scholar-practitioner exchanges, and co-hosts the Global Labour Journal.

The center promotes the transdisciplinary study of the human condition. It supports and promotes team-based, interdisciplinary basic research on the evolution of humans and human diversity, and educational research and outreach related to this research.

The center supports research on the role information plays in the production of social meaning and value across the human sciences, from the orality-literacy transition to the new digital media.

The center houses research and events that form a central hub for the international human resource management scholarly community, enabling the sharing of ideas to advance knowledge and practice in the field.

The Center for Language Acquisition is a research unit that focuses on conducting and supporting applied linguistics research on the teaching, learning, and assessment of foreign and second languages.

The Center for Language Science is an interdisciplinary group of linguists, psycholinguists, applied linguists, speech-language pathologists, speech scientists, and cognitive neuroscientists who share an interest in language acquisition and bilingualism.

C-SoDA integrates social, scientific, computational, informational, statistical, and visual analytic approaches to analyze large or complex data that arise from human interaction. supports research and education campus wide in Social Data Analytics.

The Child Attention and Learning Lab studies the cognitive and neuropsychological processes that contribute to the development of attention problems in children.

The lab focuses on understanding how language develops in typical and non-typical ways in young children, adolescents, and adults in an effort to help children and adults who struggle with learning, speaking, and understanding language.

The center supports six interdisciplinary research initiatives, fifty-four major externally-funded research projects, two graduate training programs, and a professional training institute, creating an interdisciplinary community committed to improving children’s lives.

The lab focuses on constructing a database for the scientific investigation of multi-word code-switching, discovering the linguistic structural conditions on code-switching, and investigating the cognitive processes involved in code-switching.

CoALA conducts research with the goal of understanding what helps learners of another language succeed. The lab uses experimental methods such as brain event-related potentials (ERPs) and eye-tracking, in connection with performance measures.

CAT Lab’s research focuses on the ways in which emotion and attention interact to shape how individuals navigate through their social world. Their main focus is on the interaction between temperament, early appearing biases in emotion, and attention in children and adults.

The Cognitive Aging and Neuroimaging (CAN) Lab examines the effects of aging on episodic memory using both behavioral and neuroimaging (fMRI) methods.

The lab houses research and teaching activities related to the way that individuals develop over their lifetimes. At the core, their projects are aimed at understanding how developmental progress comes about.

The lab uses psychometric, neuroimaging, and naturalistic approaches to understand how people create new ideas and solve complex problems. We also develop new tools to measure creative thinking and explore how creative thinking works in different contexts and domains.

The Context and Development Lab examines adolescent development from middle to high school to understand how aspects of the residential neighborhood, school, and family contexts are related to adolescents’ academic adjustment and beliefs as well as their deviant behaviors.

The CaRES Lab focuses on environmental stress and how children and families adapt to it. They are particularly interested in discovering sources of resiliency in children and their families and using this information to build programs to strengthen children and families.

The Criminal Justice Research Center bridges the gap between research and criminal justice practice by fostering a rigorous research agenda and transferring knowledge directly to criminal justice practitioners and policymakers.

The lab focuses on exploring and understanding the ways in which culture influences basic emotional processes and on understanding the consequences of cultural variations in emotion, especially in terms of health, mental health, and well-being.

The Development, Risk, and Resilience Lab works to understand when and under what circumstances developmental trajectories of children begin to diverge from normative trajectories among families who are struggling with substance abuse and related issues.

This research group uses a range of behavioral (reaction-time methods and eye-tracking) and electrophysiological (ERPs) methods, to examine the way in which bilingual readers and speakers negotiate the presence of two languages in a single mind.

The Emotion Development Lab aims to understand the complex systems involved in the development of emotion, emotion regulation, temperament, and adjustment from infancy to early adolescence.

The EMP Lab studies the mechanisms involved in empathy and moral decision-making by using insights and methodologies from affective science, social cognition, and moral philosophy, to understand how people think about and respond to social and ethical situations.

EPPIC is a research and academic support center that focuses on advanced English for academic and professional purposes. It provides instruction on spoken and written English to multilingual students and scholars via workshops, consultations, and customized programming.

The Feelings, Behavior, and Information Processing Lab investigates when, why, and how feelings influence people’s daily lives.

The Families Interested In Research STudies (FIRSt) database was established to connect Penn State researchers and families with infants and young children in central Pennsylvania who are interested in participating in research.

The lab focuses on understanding how genes and environment interact throughout the lifespan. Their research is focused on studying how individuals influence their environments with genetically influenced characteristics.

The Richards Center advances research on the history of slavery, race, and democracy in the United States. It hosts the premiere journal in Civil War Era studies, organizes events, and provides support for faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, and postdoctoral fellows.

The Gilmore Lab studies the development of perception, action, and memory in order to understand patterns of brain and behavioral change in infants, children, and young adults.

The GoPals Pre-Kindergarten Club helps parents and teachers support the social-emotional and academic school readiness of children going to kindergarten in the fall in the Mifflin County, Juniata County, and Huntingdon Area School Districts.

The Group Identity and Social Perception Lab investigates people’s psychological and behavioral adaptations to social environments that pose ongoing psychological threats.

Research-based and Developmentally Informed (REDI) is an early learning program for preschool children that was developed in partnership with Head Start programs in Pennsylvania. REDI helps build student school readiness skills in the domain of social-emotional development. 

The Humanities Institute supports the generation and promotion of ideas in all aspects of the humanities and related disciplines. It engages Penn State faculty, other academics, and the public in ongoing discussion of the most pressing questions of our time.

The Karuza Lab uses behavioral experiments and functional neuroimaging techniques (like fMRI) to understand the broad spectrum of patterns human learners extract from their surroundings.

The Laboratory for Anxiety and Depression Research engages in a number of activities that include basic and applied research surrounding the topic of the nature and treatment of anxiety and depressive disorders.

The Levy Lab focuses on attachment theory, emotion regulation, personality disorders, and psychotherapy process and outcome. They study how mental representations develop, consolidate, and change in the context of close relationships and how they influence personality development.

The Laboratory of Developmental Neuroscience is interested in the typical and atypical development of face processing, particularly as it relates to adolescence and autism.

The Language Acquisition Lab examines language development in children between 2–7 years of age, focusing on the acquisition of linguistic and extralinguistic variation and how variable input and inconsistent input affect the acquisition of the target grammar.

The Language and Aging Lab focuses on the relations between the brain and behavior. Specifically, the lab studies neural factors that contribute to age-related retention (semantics) and decline (phonology) that have been observed in language production.

Language Contact in the Field researchers focus on extending ethnographic, sociolinguistic, and psycholinguistic research to in situ language contact settings where the effects of prescriptivism, formal schooling, and linguistic insecurity are minimal.

The Learning Lab examines the ways learners extract the information they need from the environment by examining learners’ sensitivity to both the simple associations and network-level structures around them, with a particular focus on which patterns best facilitate learning.

Students at Penn State are encouraged to take a deep dive into the world of sustainable research. Student research, along with important work from faculty, has gone a long way to help members of the College of the Liberal Arts community understand the science and practice of sustainability at Penn State and across the globe.

The lab focuses on the theoretical triggers that catalyze personality-related behavior and the theoretical mechanisms that serve to channel the triggers into observable behaviors and actions.

While bilinguals use one language at a time, it is clear their languages are not separate systems, but rather a single “compound” system. This lab seeks to understand what this means by exploring how the sound systems and lexicons of languages interact in the bilingual mind.

The primary goal of the MultiMorph research group is to contribute to the building and refining of a precise theory of the morphology and syntax of natural languages.

The Arnett Lab studies the neuropsychological aspects of multiple sclerosis with special emphasis on contributors to depression, cognitive functioning, fatigue, and general quality of life. A second line of research explores the consequences of sports-related concussions.

The Hillary Lab focuses on understanding recovery of function after neurological disruption, particularly after severe traumatic brain injury, where individuals experience coma from days to weeks after injury.

Researchers in the Parent-Child Dynamics Lab study ways that parenting and parent-child interaction patterns influence child development.

PACT focuses on community-engaged research. Together, PACT Investigators and community members and organizations increase the cultural sensitivity and impact of research while improving the lives of children, youth, and families in the greater Harrisburg region.

This lab studies the psychology of personality.

The Relationships and Stress Lab’s research is designed to determine causal mechanisms and contextual factors that contribute to the occurrence of psychological and physical aggression in close relationships.

The Reproductive Justice Project is a research center dedicated to the advancement of reproductive justice. They produce research that enhances efforts to decolonize reproductive and sexual health services in settler colonial societies, including the United States.

The Rock Ethics Institute promotes engaged ethics research and leadership by supporting interdisciplinary collaborations, promoting ethical literacy and leadership at Penn State, and engaging community partners and the public in collaborative ways.

The Second Language Acquisition Lab uses both behavioral and neurophysiological research methods to investigate how second language speakers process words and sentences in both their first and second languages.

The Semantics, Aphasia, and Neural Dynamics Lab uses research to contribute to the understanding of the mechanisms of brain plasticity in post-stroke chronic aphasia related to improved behavioral outcomes of therapy to develop more effective treatment strategies.

The lab studies the concept of “social vision”—where vision and social science overlap—as well as “threat-related enjoyment/humor” to better understand how negative life events and people’s attempts to suppress related thoughts actually enhance humor responses.

The Speech Production Lab works to develop evidence-based interventions to improve speech intelligibility (how understandable speech is) in people with dysarthria, a type of motor speech disorder.

The Swim Lab uses experimental and survey research to examine the psychological underpinnings of people’s willingness to engage in personal and collective pro-environmental actions and support policies that affect natural processes and, by extension, all life.

The McCourtney Institute for Democracy is an interdisciplinary research center that seeks to understand, preserve, and defend democracy. They strive to help people in the Penn State community and beyond become better democratic citizens through research, education, and outreach.

The Workplace Emotional Labor and Diversity Lab focuses on the challenge of balancing one’s self and work demands, with implications for both employee health and performance. In particular, they study regulating emotions and coping with stereotypes and biases.

World in Conversation’s mission is to train small-group facilitators who can enable people on both sides of a border (whatever that border is) to solve problems together. In their view, this is “true” public diplomacy—and instrumental for cross-border peace and security.