My postings to this point have all focused on academics. As I've said, I would also like to talk about some of the cultural/entertainment amenities of Ann Arbor. Let's start with food!
Ann Arbor probably covers the same range of dining tastes one would find in a prospering college town or in the suburbs of a major city. One area in which I would say Ann Arbor stands out is in its vegetarian dining options. As I recall, three out of the eight students in my Fall '84 entering graduate school cohort (myself included) were vegetarians, so this is of personal relevance!
The first restaurant I'd recommend to vegetarians is Seva. I make it a point to go to Seva on all my return visits to Ann Arbor. As can be seen in the comments from the linked document, Seva has a wonderful variety of food, as well as a nice atmosphere.
Another good place for vegetarians is Afternoon Delight. "AD," as some people call it, has a bright, lively atmosphere. One goes along a cafeteria-type line, either ordering a made-to-order dish or sampling from what's out, pays, and then sits down. It's a good, relatively quick place to, for example, take a break from your data analysis or writing and grab dinner. Niall Bolger, a Michigan post doc at the time and now a professor at NYU, and I used to run into each other frequently at AD.
Perhaps the restaurant most uniquely identified nationally with Ann Arbor is Zingerman's delicatessen. Although I can't find a link now, Zingerman's made some kind of USA Today Top Ten list for delicatessens a few years back. Based on things I've read over the years, Zingerman's really seems to pride itself on concentrating solely on the Ann Arbor community and not going national.
Another relatively famous place is Angelo's restaurant, which specializes in breakfasts (not being a morning person, I didn't get to Angelo's all that often). As you can hear from the Angelo's website, the place even has its own theme song! Angelo's is featured prominently in the 1989 book Big Ten Country by Bob Wood.
Ann Arbor being a college town, it naturally had a wide variety of pizza places. My favorite place -- and indeed my favorite restaurant of any kind in the nation -- was Pizzeria Uno, the deep-dish pizza place that originated on the corner of Wabash and Ohio in Chicago. To this day, I'm still trying to get to as many Uno's restaurants nationally as I can. However, the Ann Arbor Uno's, located on South University, went out of business in the mid-90s. It was the site of many grad student gatherings (birthdays, dissertation defense celebrations, etc.) during my years at UM. When not with a group, I made a weekly take-out order from Uno's.
One of the more colorful local places is Pizza Bob's on State St., known for its exotic pizza toppings.
Ann Arbor is also, of course, the home of Domino's Pizza, which was embroiled in controversy over the political views of founder Tom Monaghan (if anyone is interested in this, you can go to the Google search engine and type in the keywords "domino's pizza" "ann arbor" "monaghan," which will bring up roughly 500 hits).
Besides pizza, another robust business in town is bagels. My favorite was always The Bagel Factory, which according to the linked document, is either gone from its longtime South U. location or about to be. In recent years, I have frequented two places in the State/North U. area, Einstein Bros. and Bruegger's. Bruegger's occupies the space of the former Drake's sandwich shop (about which, more below). In what I think is a classy gesture, Bruegger's has photographs of the old Drake's on the wall.
Drake's, in my mind, was the prototypical quaint, old-fashioned, college-town hangout. It closed in 1993, but there's a nice Drake's tribute page on the web. Drake's appears to go back to at least the 1920s. From the wooden booths to the hand-painted signs, even in the 1980s Drake's probably didn't look much different from how it did generations ago. Customers would come in, go up to the counter to write out their own order on the forms depicted on the tribute site, and then go sit down and wait for their order to be called out. Drake's also had an amazing assortment of candies for sale, displayed in these large glass jars (see the photos on the tribute site).
The aforementioned restaurants are/were largely in the central campus area. The more "downtown-ish" Main Street area a few blocks from campus has some more upscale places, but I tended to stick to the campus area.
I'm obviously just scratching the surface, even with what has now become a fairly extended summary. Please e-mail me with your dining favorites and I'll post an addendum.
An Unofficial Page by Alan Reifman, Ph.D. '89
Friday, February 27, 2004
Friday, February 20, 2004
Former UM Psych Prof Nancy Cantor to Become Chancellor at Syracuse
It may not exactly be breaking news, but it's still pretty recent news. Former UM psychology professor Nancy Cantor will be leaving her position as chancellor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign to take a similar position at Syracuse University.
Nancy spent many years at Michigan (during two stints) as a professor, dean, and provost. As noted in a Syracuse document on her professional history, Nancy served from 1984-1988 as area chairperson in personality psychology at Michigan. As I've noted, however, UM's social and personality programs had strong ties and Nancy had an office in the Institute for Social Research, where the social program was based at the time (the transformation from having the different psychology areas headquartered in different buildings to the housing of all programs within a single psychology building is something I'll discuss in a future posting).
Nancy worked with several personality and social psychology graduate students during the time I was at UM (I took a class from Nancy, but never worked on research with her). During the mid-eighties, Nancy appeared to be in the closing stages of research on prototypes, an area in which she worked with students such as Nancy Genero and Paula Niedenthal (see earlier posting for link to her).
For the period of the mid-late 1980s, I mainly associate Nancy with launching an extensive program of research on construal of life tasks, such as academic achievement and seeking independence. In this endeavor, Nancy was joined by students such as Julie Norem, Sabrina Zirkel, and Chris Langston.
Also, Carolin Showers (see earlier posting for link) authored a 1985 Annual Review of Psychology chapter with Nancy entitled, "Social cognition: A look at motivated strategies."
A local news article gives some idea of the circumstances surrounding Nancy's move to Syracuse. She became involved in the controversy over the University of Illinois's Chief Illiniwek mascot. One pro-Chief supporter even bought anti-Cantor billboards!
On a more positive note, one Illinois professor said of Nancy:
"It's like a death in the family. In the 30 years I've been here, she's been overwhelmingly the most effective campus leader."
Nancy spent many years at Michigan (during two stints) as a professor, dean, and provost. As noted in a Syracuse document on her professional history, Nancy served from 1984-1988 as area chairperson in personality psychology at Michigan. As I've noted, however, UM's social and personality programs had strong ties and Nancy had an office in the Institute for Social Research, where the social program was based at the time (the transformation from having the different psychology areas headquartered in different buildings to the housing of all programs within a single psychology building is something I'll discuss in a future posting).
Nancy worked with several personality and social psychology graduate students during the time I was at UM (I took a class from Nancy, but never worked on research with her). During the mid-eighties, Nancy appeared to be in the closing stages of research on prototypes, an area in which she worked with students such as Nancy Genero and Paula Niedenthal (see earlier posting for link to her).
For the period of the mid-late 1980s, I mainly associate Nancy with launching an extensive program of research on construal of life tasks, such as academic achievement and seeking independence. In this endeavor, Nancy was joined by students such as Julie Norem, Sabrina Zirkel, and Chris Langston.
Also, Carolin Showers (see earlier posting for link) authored a 1985 Annual Review of Psychology chapter with Nancy entitled, "Social cognition: A look at motivated strategies."
A local news article gives some idea of the circumstances surrounding Nancy's move to Syracuse. She became involved in the controversy over the University of Illinois's Chief Illiniwek mascot. One pro-Chief supporter even bought anti-Cantor billboards!
On a more positive note, one Illinois professor said of Nancy:
"It's like a death in the family. In the 30 years I've been here, she's been overwhelmingly the most effective campus leader."
Friday, February 13, 2004
Today, I will start a new feature called "What Were They Working On?" in reference to faculty research in the Michigan social psychology program in the 1980s. Bob Zajonc will be the focus of this initial entry. One of the most eminent social psychologists of all-time, Bob is well-known for his work on social facilitation, mere exposure, the confluence model (family configuration and intelligence), and affect and cognition, among other things. Bob received his Ph.D. at Michigan and then remained there as a faculty member for nearly 40 years, before moving to Stanford in 1994.
According to the following biography, Bob was born in 1923. One of my classmates who saw Bob at the recent SPSP conference opined that Bob does not look that much different from how he did 20 years ago, a judgment in which I concur. Bob received the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution (DSC) Award in 1978. One study ranked him 35th among Eminent Psychologists of the 20th Century. A Festschrift was held for him at Michigan in 1998, and last year, a book entitled The Selected Works of R.B. Zajonc was published.
One could spend all day citing Bob's accomplishments and impact on the field. However, in keeping with the purpose of this website, I will discuss the research he was working on during the 1980s. In February 1980, Bob's DSC Award address was published in American Psychologist with the title "Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences." Clearly, affect had become the major focus for Bob by the time my graduate school cohort entered in the Fall of 1984. In 1985, Bob published the article "Emotion and Facial Efference: A Theory Reclaimed" in Science. This article represented an attempt to revivify a much older theory by Israel Waynbaum (1907). According to a summary on the web, "Waynbaum felt that the the [sic] face muscles can constrict facial arteries and veins and thus somehow control cerebral blood flow, which is know [sic] to be important in emotions."
Starting with this idea that facial muscular movement could lead to emotional states, Bob and a number of graduate students undertook an ambitious program of empirical research relating to facial expressions and emotion. One product of this work was the 1989 Psychological Review article by Bob, graduate student Sheila Murphy, and Marita Inglehart entitled "Feeling and Facial Efference: Implications of the Vascular Theory of Emotion."
Along with Sheila, another student who worked extensively with Bob in this area was Pam Adelmann. Bob, Pam, and Sheila teamed up with another student, Paula Niedenthal, to publish a 1987 article in Motivation and Emotion entitled "Convergence in the Physical Appearance of Spouses." (As an aside, I liked the acronym that could be formed from the authors' last names, ZAMN, as in Sha-zam.) Subjects looked at photographs of individual members of married couples at the time of marriage and 25 years later. Couple members were judged by subjects to look more similar in the later pictures than in the earlier ones, possibly as a result of spouses imitating each other's facial expressions over the years and building up their facial muscles in the same way, just as exercising in a gym builds up muscles in other parts of the body. This study, in fact, was featured in an August 11, 1987 New York Times article by Daniel Goleman.
Another student who worked extensively with Bob was Danny McIntosh, in the latter part of the 1980s and into the 90s. (Current web links for all of the aforementioned students are listed below with some of my earlier postings.)
In the Fall 1985 semester, Bob also taught an excellent social cognition graduate seminar, which I was fortunate to be able to take. If anyone wants a copy of the syllabus, just e-mail me and provide a fax number!
In the summer of 2003 during a visit I made to Stanford to watch the USA Track and Field Championships, Bob and Hazel Markus were kind enough to take me to lunch on campus. Naturally, most of our time was spent reminiscing about UM and Ann Arbor. I think everyone was in agreement that, "You can take the people out of Michigan, but you can't take the Michigan out of the people!"
Additional Alumni Notes. I heard from Greg Diamond the other day. Greg was in my cohort, and after receiving his Ph.D. and teaching for some years, he switched fields. He attended Columbia Law School, where he made Law Review. If you click here and then select Greg's name in the menu of authors, you'll see one of his articles. Greg also operates his own blog on the web.
Greg suggested that I put in links to Lorraine Gutierrez and Robert Ortega, two current UM social work faculty members who were in the joint social work-social psychology program with us.
Greg also wanted to note the passing a couple years ago of Karen Siegel-Jacobs, who was a contemporary of ours in the experimental psychology program.
According to the following biography, Bob was born in 1923. One of my classmates who saw Bob at the recent SPSP conference opined that Bob does not look that much different from how he did 20 years ago, a judgment in which I concur. Bob received the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution (DSC) Award in 1978. One study ranked him 35th among Eminent Psychologists of the 20th Century. A Festschrift was held for him at Michigan in 1998, and last year, a book entitled The Selected Works of R.B. Zajonc was published.
One could spend all day citing Bob's accomplishments and impact on the field. However, in keeping with the purpose of this website, I will discuss the research he was working on during the 1980s. In February 1980, Bob's DSC Award address was published in American Psychologist with the title "Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences." Clearly, affect had become the major focus for Bob by the time my graduate school cohort entered in the Fall of 1984. In 1985, Bob published the article "Emotion and Facial Efference: A Theory Reclaimed" in Science. This article represented an attempt to revivify a much older theory by Israel Waynbaum (1907). According to a summary on the web, "Waynbaum felt that the the [sic] face muscles can constrict facial arteries and veins and thus somehow control cerebral blood flow, which is know [sic] to be important in emotions."
Starting with this idea that facial muscular movement could lead to emotional states, Bob and a number of graduate students undertook an ambitious program of empirical research relating to facial expressions and emotion. One product of this work was the 1989 Psychological Review article by Bob, graduate student Sheila Murphy, and Marita Inglehart entitled "Feeling and Facial Efference: Implications of the Vascular Theory of Emotion."
Along with Sheila, another student who worked extensively with Bob in this area was Pam Adelmann. Bob, Pam, and Sheila teamed up with another student, Paula Niedenthal, to publish a 1987 article in Motivation and Emotion entitled "Convergence in the Physical Appearance of Spouses." (As an aside, I liked the acronym that could be formed from the authors' last names, ZAMN, as in Sha-zam.) Subjects looked at photographs of individual members of married couples at the time of marriage and 25 years later. Couple members were judged by subjects to look more similar in the later pictures than in the earlier ones, possibly as a result of spouses imitating each other's facial expressions over the years and building up their facial muscles in the same way, just as exercising in a gym builds up muscles in other parts of the body. This study, in fact, was featured in an August 11, 1987 New York Times article by Daniel Goleman.
Another student who worked extensively with Bob was Danny McIntosh, in the latter part of the 1980s and into the 90s. (Current web links for all of the aforementioned students are listed below with some of my earlier postings.)
In the Fall 1985 semester, Bob also taught an excellent social cognition graduate seminar, which I was fortunate to be able to take. If anyone wants a copy of the syllabus, just e-mail me and provide a fax number!
In the summer of 2003 during a visit I made to Stanford to watch the USA Track and Field Championships, Bob and Hazel Markus were kind enough to take me to lunch on campus. Naturally, most of our time was spent reminiscing about UM and Ann Arbor. I think everyone was in agreement that, "You can take the people out of Michigan, but you can't take the Michigan out of the people!"
Additional Alumni Notes. I heard from Greg Diamond the other day. Greg was in my cohort, and after receiving his Ph.D. and teaching for some years, he switched fields. He attended Columbia Law School, where he made Law Review. If you click here and then select Greg's name in the menu of authors, you'll see one of his articles. Greg also operates his own blog on the web.
Greg suggested that I put in links to Lorraine Gutierrez and Robert Ortega, two current UM social work faculty members who were in the joint social work-social psychology program with us.
Greg also wanted to note the passing a couple years ago of Karen Siegel-Jacobs, who was a contemporary of ours in the experimental psychology program.
Saturday, February 07, 2004
Updating Web Links to UM Social Psych Alums
As I had hoped, a couple of 1980s alums from the UM social psych program e-mailed me with web links to additional 80s graduates (my original set of Ph.D. alum links is located in my very first posting at the bottom of the screen). Most of the links to follow are for traditional individual homepages, but a few are to directories that list the person; the latter still provides information on where someone is now.
Paula Pietromonaco sent in a link for herself, and for Yaacov Schul. She also suggested Geoff Fong, whose website I tracked down. These people were all at Michigan in the early 80s. Another person I thought of from that era is John Bargh.
Kerth O'Brien (whose link is in the original list below) also e-mailed me several graduates' web links. I couldn't help notice that many of the people in Kerth's list are today involved in applied fields such as health care, social work, and the court system. This just shows the breadth of training and job placements one can receive from studying at UM. In addition to traditional laboratory experimental social psychology, the program provides opportunities to focus on survey research, as well as to work with faculty in other departments. Here are the people Kerth provided:
Pamela Adelmann
Jan Beals
Cleo Caldwell
Terry Conway
Charlene Depner
James Friedrich
Aida Hurtado
Oksana Malanchuk
Paula Nurius
Aloen Townsend
Kerth also noted Ruby Beale is at Hampton University, but didn’t have a webpage or e-mail address for her.
I've also found some additional links myself:
Jerry Isaac (The linked document is very long; he's listed on page 31, under Administrative Staff.)
Judy Shapiro
Lynne Sutherland
Elissa Wurf
Finally, here are two people whom I believe started the UM grad program in Fall 1989, thus barely falling within the scope of the 1980s:
Michele Acker
Diane Holmberg
Paula Pietromonaco sent in a link for herself, and for Yaacov Schul. She also suggested Geoff Fong, whose website I tracked down. These people were all at Michigan in the early 80s. Another person I thought of from that era is John Bargh.
Kerth O'Brien (whose link is in the original list below) also e-mailed me several graduates' web links. I couldn't help notice that many of the people in Kerth's list are today involved in applied fields such as health care, social work, and the court system. This just shows the breadth of training and job placements one can receive from studying at UM. In addition to traditional laboratory experimental social psychology, the program provides opportunities to focus on survey research, as well as to work with faculty in other departments. Here are the people Kerth provided:
Pamela Adelmann
Jan Beals
Cleo Caldwell
Terry Conway
Charlene Depner
James Friedrich
Aida Hurtado
Oksana Malanchuk
Paula Nurius
Aloen Townsend
Kerth also noted Ruby Beale is at Hampton University, but didn’t have a webpage or e-mail address for her.
I've also found some additional links myself:
Jerry Isaac (The linked document is very long; he's listed on page 31, under Administrative Staff.)
Judy Shapiro
Lynne Sutherland
Elissa Wurf
Finally, here are two people whom I believe started the UM grad program in Fall 1989, thus barely falling within the scope of the 1980s:
Michele Acker
Diane Holmberg
Monday, February 02, 2004
Visiting with Michigan Social Psych Folks at SPSP Conference
Just got back from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in Austin, Texas. I would say I saw roughly 25 1980s-era Michigan people there, including those who were UM undergraduates, graduate students, post docs, and faculty members at the time. I also saw some people who came to Michigan a little after the 80s. Here are some of the people I saw (with apologies to anyone I've left out).
Hazel Markus, who spent probably over 20 years at Michigan as a graduate student and faculty member before moving to Stanford in the early 1990s, gave the SPSP Presidential Address, which was entitled "Social and Personality Psychology: Made in the USA." Continuing a long line of cross-cultural studies, Hazel focused specifically on the belief system in this country that sees the self (and only the self) as the source of individual actions, accomplishments, and choices, and on the historical and cultural supports for such a belief system. She showed videotapes of television coverage of two recent Olympic gold medalists, a US swimmer and a Japanese runner. The former, when interviewed, talked about "digging deep" within herself to summon the strength to win. The latter, in contrast, made it a point during her victory lap to acknowledge her coach, manager, and shoe designer, apparently crediting the contextual contributions to her (or her "team's") success. Both anecdotes and research studies were presented. Hazel was introduced by 80s graduate student and current Michigan faculty member Shinobu Kitayama.
Current UM Psychology Department Chair Rich Gonzalez was there. As I told Rich, I remember that when I was a first-year grad student at Michigan during the 1984-85 academic year, he came to visit as he was looking at grad schools (he ultimately opted for Stanford). What more compelling illustration is there of how time has flown by than seeing someone whom you met as a prospective graduate student now serving as department chair?
Two 80s grad students who are now based in France, Jill Klein and Paula Niedenthal, each attended the conference. Other former social psych grad students attending included Darrin Lehman (whom I had not seen in many years), Carolin Showers, Susan Cross (who suggested that this website could be used to help organize reunions of former Michigan people at future SPSP conferences), Chris Crandall, and Monica Biernat.
Daphna Oyserman, a joint social psychology-social work grad student at Michigan and now back at UM was also in attendance at SPSP. Former personality psych grad students Will Fleeson, Rob Sellers, Tim Ketelaar, and Jean Twenge were also there. Tim and Jean were actually 90s-era Wolverines.
Eighties-era UM post-docs were also well represented in Austin, including Mark Baldwin (who in between academic stints co-starred in the children's television program Camp Cariboo, which I discovered many years later on cable), Pete Ditto, Geraldine Downey, and Niall Bolger. As is frequently the case, Niall was a hub of activity; at the poster sessions and social hours, people were swarming Niall as if he were the fifth Beatle!
Jennifer Lerner, who was an undergraduate student in a section of social psychology that I TA'd (as part of a large amphitheatre-type lecture class) is now on the faculty at Carnegie-Mellon. Jennifer chaired a symposium at SPSP entitled "The Feel of a Decision."
A couple of other people I saw were Suzanne Thompson, who was a visiting faculty member at Michigan in the Winter 1985 semester, and Traci Giuliano, who visited Michigan when looking at grad schools but opted for UCLA (another fine school and my undergraduate alma mater).
(Note: People above whose names do not have an active web link should be linked in the message below.)
Hazel Markus, who spent probably over 20 years at Michigan as a graduate student and faculty member before moving to Stanford in the early 1990s, gave the SPSP Presidential Address, which was entitled "Social and Personality Psychology: Made in the USA." Continuing a long line of cross-cultural studies, Hazel focused specifically on the belief system in this country that sees the self (and only the self) as the source of individual actions, accomplishments, and choices, and on the historical and cultural supports for such a belief system. She showed videotapes of television coverage of two recent Olympic gold medalists, a US swimmer and a Japanese runner. The former, when interviewed, talked about "digging deep" within herself to summon the strength to win. The latter, in contrast, made it a point during her victory lap to acknowledge her coach, manager, and shoe designer, apparently crediting the contextual contributions to her (or her "team's") success. Both anecdotes and research studies were presented. Hazel was introduced by 80s graduate student and current Michigan faculty member Shinobu Kitayama.
Current UM Psychology Department Chair Rich Gonzalez was there. As I told Rich, I remember that when I was a first-year grad student at Michigan during the 1984-85 academic year, he came to visit as he was looking at grad schools (he ultimately opted for Stanford). What more compelling illustration is there of how time has flown by than seeing someone whom you met as a prospective graduate student now serving as department chair?
Two 80s grad students who are now based in France, Jill Klein and Paula Niedenthal, each attended the conference. Other former social psych grad students attending included Darrin Lehman (whom I had not seen in many years), Carolin Showers, Susan Cross (who suggested that this website could be used to help organize reunions of former Michigan people at future SPSP conferences), Chris Crandall, and Monica Biernat.
Daphna Oyserman, a joint social psychology-social work grad student at Michigan and now back at UM was also in attendance at SPSP. Former personality psych grad students Will Fleeson, Rob Sellers, Tim Ketelaar, and Jean Twenge were also there. Tim and Jean were actually 90s-era Wolverines.
Eighties-era UM post-docs were also well represented in Austin, including Mark Baldwin (who in between academic stints co-starred in the children's television program Camp Cariboo, which I discovered many years later on cable), Pete Ditto, Geraldine Downey, and Niall Bolger. As is frequently the case, Niall was a hub of activity; at the poster sessions and social hours, people were swarming Niall as if he were the fifth Beatle!
Jennifer Lerner, who was an undergraduate student in a section of social psychology that I TA'd (as part of a large amphitheatre-type lecture class) is now on the faculty at Carnegie-Mellon. Jennifer chaired a symposium at SPSP entitled "The Feel of a Decision."
A couple of other people I saw were Suzanne Thompson, who was a visiting faculty member at Michigan in the Winter 1985 semester, and Traci Giuliano, who visited Michigan when looking at grad schools but opted for UCLA (another fine school and my undergraduate alma mater).
(Note: People above whose names do not have an active web link should be linked in the message below.)
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