Research Bites Podcast Kristina Spaulding, PhD, CAAB

This episode's guest is Rose Browne.  She was a student in my Unlocking Resilience course. I decided to have her on because I was so impressed by one of the assignments that she submitted for this course that I asked if she'd be willing to come on the podcast to talk about her idea more and share it with a wider audience.

Rose is a Karen Pryor Academy Certified Training Partner and a Fear-free Certified professional animal trainer. With over 25 years of experience in dog training with a primary focus on canine behavior modification and preventing problems before they begin. She teaches group classes and also develops and implements private training and behavior modification plans for her company Dynamic Canines. She has extensive experience in education and canine development and behavior, from working with and taking accredited courses with world-renowned professionals in the field of animal behavior. Please join us for this fascinating conversation where Rose shares with us an exercise that she has developed called Puppy Trails.

Dr. McClain is a licensed clinical psychologist who has 27 years of experience administering and evaluating a wide variety of personality, intelligence, and aptitude psychological tests. She is an innovative and understanding professional proficient in mental health and therapeutic interventions and protocols.
In addition, she has expertise in ADHD and PTSD and is well-versed in providing strategic direction and ongoing leadership to academic programs. She obtained her certification in dog training from Catch Canine Trainers Academy in 2022, and is the owner of Positive Attitude Dog Trainers in Northern West Virginia where she provides obedience training and behavioral consultation.

In this episode, we talk about how to navigate those challenging and sensitive client conversations, what to do when the client isn't receptive to your recommendations, and how to prevent and address burnout.

Advanced Training Practicum: https://sciencemattersllc.com/advanced-consulting 

Dr. Lindsay Palmer is a social psychologist who earned her PhDs in Psychology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from the Pennsylvania State University in 2022. Before attending Penn State, she earned her B.A. from the University of Virginia and managed a UVa laboratory in social cognition and behavior for two years. Currently, she is a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at the UMass Chan Medical School. She has been accepted as a scholar at the Human-Animal Studies Summer Institute at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to further advance her work in the human-animal bond. Dr. Palmer has several lines of research related to social and health disparities, diversity, prejudice, and stigma. Her work on the human-animal bond examines social factors and psychological mechanisms that impact the relationship between humans and animals. In this episode we talk about all kinds of fascinating topics including the impact of hegemonic masculinity on the endorsement of dominance theory, how to have conversations with people who disagree with you and diversity, equity, and inclusivity.

You can reach Lindsay at https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindsay-palmer-0904b51a2/ 

In this episode, I speak with Doctor Clive Wynne. Dr. Wynne is Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University and Director of Research at Wolf Park, Indiana. He was educated at University College London and Edinburgh University in Scotland and has studied animal behavior in Britain, Germany, the U.S., and Australia in species ranging from pigeons to dunnarts (a mouse-sized marsupial). Several years ago he founded the Canine Cognition and Behavior Lab dedicated to the study of dogs and their wild relatives. As well as numerous scientific papers, he has also written for Psychology Today, American Scientist, the New York Times, and other outlets. His science has been featured on several TV shows such as National Geographic, Nova ScienceNow, and others. He is the author of the textbook Animal Cognition (now in a new edition) and former editor-in-chief of the journal Behavioural Processes. His most recent book is Dog is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You (Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2020). 
In this episode, we talk about the current state of dog behavior research, anthropomorphism, and the science of clicker training.

Dr. Wynne's page: https://www.clivewynne.com/
Arizona State University page: https://search.asu.edu/profile/2218677 

Your host: Kristina Spaulding, PhD, CAAB with Science Matters Academy of Animal Behavior, LLC

In this episode, I speak with Dr. Emily Bray, Ph.D. Dr. Bray is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Arizona Canine Cognition Center in the College of Veterinary Medicine and at Canine Companions, the largest US non-profit providing service dogs to people with disabilities. She earned her undergraduate degree at Duke University, completing a senior thesis at the Duke Canine Cognition Center investigating context specificity of inhibitory control in pet dogs. She then went on to earn a Ph.D. from the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. For her dissertation, she partnered with The Seeing Eye—the oldest guide dog school in the United States—to conduct a longitudinal study investigating the development of behavior and cognition in dogs. Most recently, in her postdoctoral research, she develops and implements cognitive tasks in hundreds of dogs from Canine Companions' population.

In this episode, we discuss development and cognition in puppies, and the Many Dogs Project (it is SO cool!).

Dr. Bray also references a project she is involved in called the Dog Aging Project. They are recruiting dogs of all ages. You can get more information at www.dogagingproject.org

You can get more information on my Unlocking Resilience course here, and learn more about Dr. Spaulding and Science Matters Academy at www.sciencemattersllc.com.

In this episode, I discuss a concept called cognitive flexibility. Cognitive flexibility allows animals to adjust their behavior to a changing environment - and it's very important for resilience!

Learn more about what cognitive flexibility is, how it impacts behavior, and how we can improve it.

Click for more information on the Advanced Consulting Course and Research Bites.

Here are links to some of the papers I discuss in the podcast:

Gelfo, F. (2019). Does experience enhance cognitive flexibility? An overview of the evidence provided by the environmental enrichment studies. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 13, 150. https://doi.org/10.3389/FNBEH.2019.00150/BIBTEX

Gökçen, G., Arslan, C., & Tras, Z. (2020). Examining the Relationship between Patience, Emotion Regulation Difficulty and Cognitive Flexibility. Online Submission, 7(7), 131–152. https://doi.org/10.46827/ejes.v7i7.3160

Kalia, V., & Knauft, K. (2020). Emotion regulation strategies modulate the effect of adverse childhood experiences on perceived chronic stress with implications for cognitive flexibility. PLOS ONE, 15(6), e0235412. https://doi.org/10.1371/JOURNAL.PONE.0235412