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Education
When I was an undergraduate and I was studying psychology and I was very interested in child psychology- developmental psychology. I also liked the volunteer experiences I was having, which were more on the side of clinical psychology- tutoring and helping out kids with severe mental disabilities.
So I said to my adviser: 'is there such a thing as developmental, clinical psychology?' I couldn't figure out how to put them together. This was 27 years ago, and it was before the term 'developmental psychopathology' had been coined. So he couldn't tell me about it- what he was able to tell me is that there is a field called Child Clinical Psychology- it's clinical psychology on children, but not necessarily taking into account everything we know about child development. I wasn't quite satisfied with that but I told him I really loved doing research, and I wanted to do research relevant to people.
He said 'well, you know you're going to have to get a Ph.D.' and I was intimidated by that thought, by four to five more years of school. I said 'well, all right.' He said 'You really need to get a degree in clinical psychology, not developmental psychology, because, as a woman, if you get a degree in developmental psychology the only jobs that that prepares you for are teaching jobs in departments of psychology, and as a woman there's no guarantee you'll get one of those. But if you get a degree in clinical psychology, then at least you could go to a clinic or a hospital, and that would guarantee you a job.'
At the time these limitations were known, and while I might not be thrilled about them I was aware of them. What he and I couldn't have anticipated is that when I got my degree five years later the universities were begging for women, and so I was in a perfect position to get a job, and that was when I came to Emory, in 1977. I was the only woman in the clinical program.
Teaching
Dr. Goodman is a Professor of Psychology at Emory as well as the Director of Clinical Training in the Graduate Program in Clinical Psychology. She teaches both an undergraduate and graduate-level seminar, which she "loves," as well as the summer study abroad program. "When we do that I get to take 12-15 undergraduates to Great Britain. It's great- I usually have continuing relationships with them."
"I want the student to leave my class having considered some questions that he or she hadn't considered before. I also want them to have grappled with the issues and understood psychological methods for dealing with complex questions. So what I really want them to learn is more the ways of thinking about psychological matters, and our methods and procedures, rather than facts, figures, and answers. That's what I hope they will take with them, what they will remember however many years later.
On her undergraduate course 'The Psychology of the Family'
"This is something I figured out a long time ago- to make this course really relevant to college students, I start with mate selection. And everybody's interested in that... There's some fascinating research on how people get matched up with their mates, and then I move on to the development of serious romantic relationship, transition to marriage and issues involved in communication and marital conflict, and then the transition to parenthood, and then grandparenting.
"I also talk about normative development- which is a sticky term. The last part of the semester I talk about the icky stuff- divorce, effects on kids, child abuse, and then I try to end on a hopeful note, like intervention, family therapy. I just love seeing the sparks in students' eyes, because there's so much to relate to personally, yet that balances out with so much knowledge that psychologists are developing about theories and models to explain this.
Research
The question I'm dealing with most actively now is how to understand the mechanism or the ways in which children born to and raised by depressed mothers experience negative outcomes. So the fist question was 'what kind of problems do they have.' Now we're onto the how and the why question- why is it that some kids end up doing just fine and some kids end up having lots and lots of problems. And I think because I've shifted to those questions I've shifted the age-range back to infants.
[For instance,] right now I'm finishing up a pilot study right now on postpartum depression; that's when mothers become depressed in the first six months after their babies are born. What I'm particularly interested in is, to what extent do the kids notice that mom is depressed- we're going a lot of taped observation with a standard rating scale.
So we're trying to figure out what it is that mothers do that leads the babies to arch their backs or turn away or get fussy or try to entertain themselves rather than counting on mom. You really see remarkable things in a young baby that seem to be the baby's way of coping with a mom who is unavailable or unpredictable or irritable or self-absorbed.
Now I'm actually hoping to have received funding to do pregnant women, where we'll collect a lot of data on her neurobiological functioning during pregnancy and try to relate that to later development of the child.
It's not quite ready for this yet, but I think ultimately the research will lead to clear-cut guidelines for early intervention for children with depressed moms. What I've been able to do now in a less formal way is that when I see patients, a mother who is depressed, I try to use what I know about how depressed moms can make things a bit worse or a bit not-so-bad for the child- so if I see a depressed mom with a baby I might point out when the baby is making a bid for her attention, which she might not have noticed because she was distracted. Or, if it's a mom with an older child, and she's describing a situation where she lost her patience with the child, I'll talk to her about strategies for controlling her anger. So I'm using the research in a way, clinically.
Every question I ask exists on a dimension where at one end there's a serious clinical disorder that I'm concerned about- so in the case of depression it's severe clinical episodes of it. And at the other end of the dimension is the very normal phenomenon of, say, sad moods.
I love observing children and trying to find different windows into their minds. Whether its observing them, or just watching and interacting with them, or watching them with their moms, or interviewing them- I find that very fascinating.
I'm also fascinated by the questions I'm asking, like: "how is it that children cope with mom's sadness and depression?"
And the other thing that motivates me is that I hope that the information that I'm gathering will be the basis for designing preventive intervention, so that we can minimize the likelihood of the bad outcomes. That's a longer-term goal.
On undergraduates in her lab
When undergraduates come into my lab, I try to figure out what they're interested in in particular, because at any given time I've got 6 different projects going on in the lab... so I just run them through brief descriptions of what's going on at the time. Usually everybody has to do some things that are kind of boring, like scoring or counting things or transferring videotape. But I also make sure that everyone's spending some time doing interesting things. The best opportunity is when we happen to be doing interviews, like we're doing with these pictures- we're in after school programs right now, interviewing 7-9 year-old children about their parents' sadness.
On gender and the sciences
It was pretty clear that I wasn't being taken very seriously at several points in time. It wasn't just my gender but being single through graduate school and early in my career.
When I finished my first year in graduate school I met with the head of the program- it was the standard procedure that they would comment on how you had done that year. He said to me 'You've done really well.' And he sounded surprised.
He said 'you know, we (we meaning the clinical faculty) were really skeptical about you when you applied.'
'Really?'
'Yeah, you know, I mean, being unmarried and young, female- we thought you were just going to come up here, find a husband, and that would be the end of you.'
I went straight to graduate school from college and I was only in graduate school for five years, a relatively short time- and that included my clinical internship and then I came to Emory and became an assistant professor, 27 years old, and I looked pretty young. And I think it was a little hard to be taken seriously
One thing that's gotten a lot better since then is that sexual harassment is illegal, even in subtle form, and people are pretty paranoid about that, which is good. The imbalances that still exist are just the reality of continued sex-roles, for example, that women still have primary responsibility for child care.
For example, I have one child, he's 13 years old, and he gets home from school at 4:30, and oftentimes there are faculty meetings and committee meetings that are called at 4:00, and that's a big problem if you want to get home to be with your kid.
Other interests
My family would have to come first. I have a husband and a son. We do a lot of things together. In fact outside of work you'd hardly ever see one of us without seeing all of us. We go for walks- we have a dog, Buster. We go on walks in the park. My husband and I run together.
We play family games. We have these little rituals every single evening. We get home, Jeff finishes his homework, which I often help him with. We have dinner together, almost every night- that's probably extraordinary. (laughs)
The next part of the ritual is a family game. We like to play monopoly or scrabble or something. And then bedtime, and I try to get an hour or so more work done after that.
Other interests are fixing up the house. I'm an avid novel-reader. Right now I'm reading the last three books of A. S. Byatt (most famous for her book Posessions.) I just read for the first time Annie Dillard. I like fairly challenging novels- something intellectually stimulating.
Advice for undergraduates
I would make sure that they really are passionate about doing research. Because that would be the life-long key to success. And I say that for two reasons: one is that research is hard to do- there are lots of frustrations and lots of obstacles, and the other is that, in order to get promoted to full professor there are lots of hoops you have to jump through and lots of pressures to produce research. So if you're doing it because you're passionate about it, you'll do what you need to do to get promoted and get a lab. And if you're not passionate about it, it's going to be really hard to meet those standards for promotion and it's going to be hard to deal with the frustrations that are inevitable.
And then, if that's a given, that they're passionate about research, then they need to be passionate about teaching too- they need to like working with the students and like the idea of teaching.
What needs to change at Emory
I would want all deans to be teachers.
I think the administration loses perspective on what faculty and student life is like. I think one example is how work mounts up ridiculously during the week of student undergraduate advising. There doesn't seem to be any consideration that those might be weeks when we might not want to ask faculty to do other extra things, and yet it inevitably happens. But if they were doing it too, [the deans] think of how that would be different.
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