Dr. Jennifer M. C. Vendemia
Associate Professor

Barnwell, Room 537-C
(803) 777-6738
jmcv@sc.edu

I received my degree from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 1998 where I studied the effects of anxiety coping styles on task performance and attention to physical stimuli. I became an instructor at the University of Georgia for two years before joining the faculty of the University of South Carolina as a Research Assistant Professor.

I have worked with the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute since 2000, and will shortly become the primary investigator on a .5 million dollar grant investigating the HD-ERP correlates of deception. I am currently a co-investigator on a grant through the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute that has completed the groundwork in this area.

Over the past several years my research has been concerned with understanding how cognitive and personality variables moderate pain perception. Pain is a dynamic phenomena formed from the interplay of several cortical and sub-cortical systems. Most of my research in this area involves simultaneously recording brain electrical activity, blood pressure, and heart rate data while participants perform tasks that are cognitively or physiologically demanding. Findings in this area have wide implications for health care.

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Helen Crawford was my mentor during my graduate career and still a personal friend in the psychology department at Virginia Tech. I had the opportunity to work with her for several years. Her present research interests focus on:

1. The relationships between and causes of individual differences in attentional, cognitive processing, and hypnotizability
2. shifts in attentional processes and cognitive processes, and
3. the accompanying neurophysiological processes (EEG, EP, and fMRI) of cognitive performance as moderated by hypnotic susceptibility level or sustained attentional abilities.

You can visit Dr. Helen Crawford and learn more about her research through her personal web page, www.psyc.vt.edu/?p=faculty&f=hjc or visit the Virginia Tech Department of Psychology Homepage, www.psyc.vt.edu.

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