Mindy Engle-Friedman

My Post-Doctoral Fellowship and Clinical Internship were completed at Brown University. I earned my PhD and MS in Clinical Psychology at Northwestern University and my BS at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

Our Lab

Dedicated post-graduate and undergraduate students who have a passion for research and who enjoy working on projects are the members of our lab. Many have had presented posters at regional and national professional conferences and a number have been authors on papers published in peer-reviewed journals. We have two areas of focus. One is on climate change and environmental sustainability and the second is on sleep loss, sleep recovery through nap taking and the influence of both on objective measures of effort.

Research

Climate Change and Environmental Sustainability

We have been collecting survey data on student attitudes and behaviors regarding climate change and environmental protection for over 10 years. Though we measure each student only once, we now have a picture of the evolution of undergraduates’ worry about climate and engagement in protecting vital natural resources. Another important survey in our lab assesses childbearing decisions and the role of climate change in family planning decision-making.

A recent experiment in our lab have focused on engaging students in environmental protection by finding strategies to overcome the limitations imposed by temporal cognition (a focus on today’s behaviors and outcomes at the expense of considering one’s behavior and its impact on the future).

Sleep loss, Nap-taking and Effort

The research in our lab focuses on the effects of sleep deprivation, and the effects of nap-taking as a sleep recovery strategy on performance requiring varying degrees of effort. I am particularly interested in how people make choices depending on the objective effort tasks require, and the use of mental short-cuts, choice behavior in math tasks, and engagement in social situations to determine how effort is expended with and without restorative naps. Recently, we’ve included athletes and regular exercisers in our participant pool to assess how naps may affect their effortful performance both in the sports setting and on cognitive tasks.

Courses

Ethics and Legal Issues in Mental Health Counseling

The graduate level Ethics and Legal Issues in Mental Health Counseling course (Psychology 9814) focuses on ethics in the therapeutic setting including issues of acculturation, bias, boundaries, confidentiality and conflicts of interest.

Environmental Psychology

Psychology 3185 considers climate change and environmental issues and how human strengths and limitations can damage or protect our fragile environment and our critical natural resources.

Psychology of Sleep

The Psychology of Sleep course (Psychology 3054) addresses sleep from many dimensions including sleep stages, sleep need, developmental changes in sleep, the physiology of sleep, sleep deprivation, sleep disorders and dreaming.

Ombuds

I have been the Baruch College Ombuds since fall 2002. The Baruch College Ombuds office offers a confidential, neutral and independent resource for faculty, staff, students and guests within the Baruch College community to voice concerns and complaints. We attempt to help find solutions and resolve conflicts that arise between members of the College. http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/ombuds/

Chair, Baruch College Task Force on Sustainability

Launched in the spring of 2008, Baruch College’s Task Force on Sustainability http://blsciblogs.baruch.cuny.edu/sustainability/ is part of the City University of New York’s Sustainability Project and PLANYC http://www.nyc.gov/html/planyc2030/html/home/home.shtml.

The Baruch College Task Force on Sustainability works to create a culture within the Baruch community, including students, faculty and staff, which understands climate change, values and practices environmental protection, seeks to solve sustainability issues at the College and facilitates broad College-based learning about sustainability. I have been the chair of the Baruch College Task Force on Sustainability since its inception. The Baruch 2018-2023 Strategic Plan includes Climate Change as a curricular goal.

Member of the Baruch College Climate Change Faculty Seminar

Baruch College faculty across Weissman College of Arts and Sciences, Zicklin School of Business and Marxe School of Public and International Affairs come together to discuss climate change education and research, and apply for grant support for Baruch College climate change initiatives.

Principal Investigator

NSF-Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU)

The Department of Psychology at Baruch College, City University of New York is site of a training program funded by the National Science Foundation entitled Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU). The program offers advanced research training for one academic year to 12 undergraduate students who attend colleges and universities in the New York metropolitan area. The program targets students belong to historically disadvantaged groups.

Publications of Interest

Engle-Friedman, M. & Young, S. (2019). Sleep’s role in effortful performance and sociability.

In Zlatan Krizan (Ed.) Personality, and Social Behavior. Springer-Nature, Switzerland.

Engle-Friedman, M., Mathew, G. M., Martinova, A., Armstrong, F., & Konstantinov, V. (2018). The role of sleep deprivation and fatigue in the perception of task difficulty and use of heuristics. Sleep Science, 11(2), 74-84.

Engle-Friedman, M., Furman, G., Lui, F., & Lee-Furman, E. (2015). Trust in media representation of environmental problems. The International Journal of Sustainability Education, 10(2), 1-18.

Engle-Friedman, M. (2014). The effects of sleep loss on capacity and effort. Sleep Science, 7(4), 213-224.

Engle-Friedman, M. (2010). Sleep and effort in adolescent athletes. Journal of Child Health Care, 14(2), 131-141.

Engle-Friedman, M., Lee, E., Furman, G., Maculaitis, M., & Cho, K. (2010). What affects attitudes and behaviors regarding environmental sustainability. The International Journal of Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability, 6(6), 41-68. http://ijs.cgpublisher.com

Presentations of Interest

Engle-Friedman, M. & Tipaldo, J. (2020, January). Family planning decisions affected by climate change. Sixteenth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability. Santiago, Chile.

Tipaldo, J., Sawhney, K. & Engle-Friedman (2019, July). Climate change: Legal activism by youth inspires age-mates. Annual Conference of the European Association of Psychology and Law 2019 that will be held in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Horne, K.A., Tipaldo, J., Kelly, C., Sawhney, K., Engle-Friedman, M. (2019, June). New and parallel-form measures of objective effort: Math task and everyday task difficulty. SLEEP, San Antonio, Texas.

Horne, K.A., Kelly, C., Tipaldo, J., DelaMata, C., Lou, J., Sawhney, K., Engle-Friedman, M. (2019, June). Objective effort and math performance predicted by night-time awakenings and total sleep time. SLEEP, San Antonio, Texas.

Horne, K.A., Lee, M., DelaMata, C., Tipaldo, J., Engle-Friedman, M. (2019, April). Relationship between anxiety and optimism and its effect on frequency of sustainable behavior. Western Psychological Association, Pasadena, California.

Horne, K.A., Lee, M., Osiecka, Z., Sawhney, K., Jones, K., Engle-Friedman, M. (2019, March). Students’ attribution of responsibility for combating climate change and its relationship to frequency of sustainable behaviors. Eastern Psychological Association, New York, New York.

Tipaldo, J., Horne, K.A., Piskorki, N., Cruz, N., Engle-Friedman, M. (2019, March). Planning to have kids? What about climate change? Eastern Psychological Association, New York, New York.

Kelly, C., Horne, K.A., DelaMata, C., Tipaldo, J., Skorokhod, Y., & Engle-Friedman, M. (2019, March). A methodological study developing parallel forms for the objective assessment of effort. International Convention of Psychological Science, Paris, France.

Horne, K.A., Lee, M., & Engle-Friedman, M. (2019, March). Correlations between personality and sustainable behaviors: Identifying the traits of future leaders on climate change. International Convention of Psychological Science, Paris, France.

Horne, K.A., Lee, M., Skorokhod, Y., & Engle-Friedman, M. (2018, November). Gender differences in sustainable behaviors and efficacy in reducing or stopping climate change. New England Psychological Association, Worcester, Massachusetts.