Faculty Profiles

Associate Professor of Psychology

B.A., Sweet Briar College

M.S., Pennsylvania State University

Ph.D., University of Virginia.

One of the things that attracted Karen Tinsley to psychology when she as a student herself was the field’s breadth. “I double-majored in psychology and sociology [because] I was interested in both aspects, society and the individual,” she says. Today she gets to keep exploring those facets, teaching everything from introductory courses in general and developmental psychology to specialty classes like child and adolescent psychopathology, multicultural psychology and psychology in the legal system.

“Psychology affords you the opportunity to do a lot of things,” Tinsley says. “One, if you don’t want to be a practicing counselor, or a clinician or a psychiatrist, you can become a professor or a researcher dealing with different aspects of social services… A lot of times, people majoring in psychology will go onto law school. And some will combine psychology with another major, like business or criminal justice. It’s a wide, wide field.”

“I tell my students at the beginning of the semester that I like a lot of discussion and interaction,” she says. Most classes are a combination of lecture and discussion or group work. Tinsley also frequently brings in current news stories and YouTube videos, connecting the primary issues of the day with the theories the class may be studying.

Tinsley is also a strong proponent of learning-by-doing. For the developmental psychology class, “students are required to do 20 hours of field work, which they really love,” she says. “A lot of times at the beginning of the semester the students are hesitant. They say, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do, I’m not used to working with children.’ But by the end of the semester they really enjoy it and they can connect it to the textbook.” Students have looked at a variety of areas such as the causes of personality disorders, identity formation, alcoholism in Native American communities and techniques to treat autism.

Students also design and perform individual and group research projects, where they have to recruit area children as subjects. The psychology department has a small observation room connected to a classroom by a one-way glass window. (“We all try to squeeze in the room,” Tinsley says.) In other classes, students do laboratory simulations of classic psychological experiments.

“The two main ones we’ve done are the doll study by Clark and Clark that looks at racial preferences [cited in the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education]. The other one is separation anxiety by Mary Ainsworth. It’s called the ‘strange situation,’ but it’s looking at attachment behavior. We’ll have the parent come in with the child, and then we’ll have the parent leave and we’ll watch how [the child] responds.”

“Students get to see all the mechanics involved in setting up [a study]. Sometimes experiments will not go well. It’s more interesting,” Tinsley says.

“I think it’s valuable [to practice doing research] in that it’s more ingrained in the students’ memories. They feel like they have more control over how they’re researching the information, how they gathered the sources and how they react to it, rather than somebody just telling them, ‘this is the significance,’ they can really see and experience it themselves.

“The more you’re directly involved and feel you have control over something, the more you can connect, and you’ll remember it and you can relate to it. There are so many little things that you might not read about that you can really get to see and experience, and how things work together.”