
Karla Murdock
Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Science, Washington and Lee University
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Programs and Events
- 2024-2025: How We Live and Die: Stories, Values, and Communities
- 2023-2024: Ethics of Design
- 2022-2023: Beneficence: Practicing an Ethics of Care
- 2021-2022: Daily Ethics: How Individual Choices and Habits Express Our Values and Shape Our World
- 2020-2021: Global Ethics in the 21st Century: Challenges and Opportunities
- 2019-2020: The Ethics of Technology
- 2018-2019: The Ethics of Identity
- 2017-2018: Equality and Difference
- 2016-2017: Markets and Morals
- 2015-2016: The Ethics of Citizenship
- 2014-2015: Race and Justice in America
- Leadership Lab
- Mudd Undergraduate Journal of Ethics
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Talk Title: The New Appendage: Cellphones in Cognitive and Behavioral Context
Co-Presenter: Wythe Whiting
Thursday, February 6, 2020, 5:00 pm, Stackhouse Theater

Karla Murdock
Professor Murdock’s research is guided by a developmental psychopathology theoretical framework. This perspective emphasizes interactions between risk and protective factors in the emergence of psychological symptoms and strengths. Her recent studies have investigated links between cellphone use and indicators of health, well-being, and cognitive performance. Her Technology and Health Lab focuses on compulsive cellphone use, sleep quality, and a new construct of co-rumination via cellphone, which is a pattern of repetitive, unproductive, problem-focused cellphone-mediated communications that is associated with compromises in psychological functioning. The Cognition in Context Lab, which is supervised collaboratively by Professors Murdock and Wythe Whiting, investigates cognitive and psychophysiological correlates of cellphone-related auditory distractions. This research utilizes a combination of survey methods, self-monitoring assessments, cognitive tasks, and psychophysiological measures (e.g., actigraphy; heart rate; blood pressure; galvanic skin response).
Recent research findings have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Clinical and Social Psychology, Behavioral Sleep Medicine, Psychology of Popular Media Culture, Cognitive Processing, and Journal of Adolescence.
- About the Mudd Center
- People
-
Programs and Events
- 2024-2025: How We Live and Die: Stories, Values, and Communities
- 2023-2024: Ethics of Design
- 2022-2023: Beneficence: Practicing an Ethics of Care
- 2021-2022: Daily Ethics: How Individual Choices and Habits Express Our Values and Shape Our World
- 2020-2021: Global Ethics in the 21st Century: Challenges and Opportunities
- 2019-2020: The Ethics of Technology
- 2018-2019: The Ethics of Identity
- 2017-2018: Equality and Difference
- 2016-2017: Markets and Morals
- 2015-2016: The Ethics of Citizenship
- 2014-2015: Race and Justice in America
- Leadership Lab
- Mudd Undergraduate Journal of Ethics
- Highlights
- Mudd Center Fellows Program
- Get Involved
The Mudd Center
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Washington and Lee University
209 Mattingly House
Lexington, VA 24450