Gary Katz, Ph.D.
Contact
- Office Location: ST 326
Office Phone: (818) 677-2964
E-mail: gary.katz@csun.edu
Website: http://www.csun.edu/~gk45683
Education
- Ph.D. 1997, University of Pittsburgh, Clinical Psychology
- M.S. 1992, University of Pittsburgh, Clinical Psychology
Specialty Areas: Clinical Psychology; Child Focus.
Courses Taught
- Psy 320/L - Statistical Methods in Psychological Research & Lab
- Psy 427 - Introduction to Psychological Testing
- Psy 454 - Clinical Psychology
Selected Publications and Presentations
Cohn, J.F. & Katz, G.S. (September 1998). Bimodal expression of emotion by face and voice. In Workshop on Face/Gesture Recognition and Their Applications, The Sixth ACM International Multimedia Conference, pp. xxx-xxx. Bristol, England.
Moore, D., Spence, M., & Katz, G.S. (1997). Six-month-olds’ categorization of natural infant-directed utterances. Developmental Psychology, 33(6), 980-989.
Katz, G.S., Cohn, J.F, & Moore, C.A. (1996). A Combination of vocal fo dynamic and summary features discriminates between three pragmatic categories of infant directed speech. Child Development, 67, 205-217.
Moore, C.A., Cohn, J.F., & Katz, G.S., (1994). Quantitative description and differentiation of fundamental frequency contours. Computer Speech and Language, 8, 1-20.
Spelke, E.S., Katz, G., Purcell, S.E., Ehrlich, S.M., & Breinlinger, K. (1994). Early knowledge of object motion: continuity, solidity, and inertia. Cognition, 51, 131-176.
Research Interests
My current research interests are in the area of vocal emotional expression. We used our voice to convey a tremendous amount of emotional information. People are quite accurate in identifying the sounds of happiness, anger, disgust, and other specific emotions. However, when asked what makes happy speech sound happy, we have considerable difficulty. I am currently investigating spectral characteristics of vocal expressions to identify the specific qualities of speech that are used to convey emotional messages. I am studying how adults use this kind of expression to communicate with other adults as well as with infants. I am also interested in cultural variations in these
emotional expressions. A second project that I am involved in studies the vocal expression of HIV-infected pediatric outpatients. Speech pathologists have noted for some time that there may be disease-related changes in the quality of children and adult HIV-infected patients but we are currently unable to quantify these changes. Quantification of these changes may lead to new ways of characterizing the nature of HIV infection, treatment monitoring, as well as psychological functioning in these children.
Additional projects on the horizon include a study of ADHD children’s access to appropriate educational remediation programs in the public school system, the role of psychophysiologic change in emotional experiencing, and possible psychophysiological variations in cognitive functioning of ADHD children.