Department of Psychology
John P. Murray
Research Fellow in Psychology
E-mail: johnpatrickmurray@hotmail.com
312 Landing Lane, Chestertown, MD 21620
Phone: 443-282-0593
John P. Murray, Ph.D. is a Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Washington College; an Emeritus Professor of Developmental Psychology in the School of Family Studies and Human Services at Kansas State University; and a Visiting Scholar in the Center on Media and Child Health at Children's Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School.
He has conducted research on children's social development for almost 40 years—starting in 1969 as a Research Coordinator for the Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior at the National Institute of Mental Health, in Washington. Subsequent appointments included teaching and research at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia; University of Michigan; the Boys Town Center for the Study of Youth Development; and Kansas State University.
His recent research projects are focused on children and violence and include studies mapping children's brain activations— using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)—while the youngsters view violent and nonviolent videos.
Dr. Murray has published 14 books and about 90 articles on the social development of children and youth.. His recent book—Children and Television: Fifty Years of Research (Norma O. Pecora, John P. Murray, & Ellen A.Wartella, Editors)—was published by Erlbaum Publishers in 2007. His recent article is "Thoughtless Vigilantes: Media Violence and Brain Activation Patterns in Young Viewers" in the International Handbook of Media Studies to be published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2011.