Comps Objectives

The psychology department integrative exercise (“comps”) is designed to provide psychology majors with a capstone experience to their psychology coursework. Students graduating with a degree in psychology have the opportunity to demonstrate and apply their mastery of content and skills they have acquired in the psychology curriculum through independent work during their senior year.

Comps Schedule

Comps is typically completed during fall and winter of senior year. Students who are considering going abroad during those terms on any program other than the department’s Cross Cultural Psychology in Prague program are responsible for making arrangements to complete their comps on an alternate schedule. This involves finding a faculty member who is willing to supervise an independent comps project off-schedule.

Capstone Seminars

During the fall term of the senior year, students enroll in a capstone seminar (PSYC399, 6 credits). The seminars focus on a current hot topic in psychology or around the work of a particular psychology researcher. Throughout the seminar, students read and discuss primary literature related to the theme(s) of the course. As part of the course, students submit a critical analysis of a set of primary sources related to a topic in the course (approx. 15-20 pages). In addition, students should have a concrete plan for expanding and revising their paper. Capstone professors give feedback to students about their writing, the content of their critical analysis, and the scope and feasibility of proposed future directions throughout the fall term.

Students will register for one of three capstone seminars (most years) via the regular registration process. [Note: the OCS Prague cross-cultural psychopathology seminar counts as a capstone seminar for seniors on the program.]

Capstone Seminar Descriptions (2026-2027)

PSYC 399:
Professor: Julia Strand

Psychology’s Credibility Revolution

Psychology and other sciences are undergoing a “credibility revolution”—an effort to make research more robust, transparent, and reliable. In this seminar, we’ll explore how research works (and sometimes goes wrong), exploring issues like false positives, publication bias, replication failures, and flexibility in measurement. Along the way, we’ll also discuss the strategies being used to improve the discipline and how to apply them to your own research and consumption of science. For the comps paper, students may choose an area of interest in any subdiscipline of psychology (e.g., cognitive, clinical, social, etc) and evaluate it through the lens of this discussion. 

PSYC 399:
Professor: Neil Lutsky

Credibility and Replication Issues in Psychological Research

This capstone seminar will review and consider contemporary evaluations of psychological science research and of the need for rigorous replications of psychology’s major findings. We will read about the “replication crisis” in psychology and other sciences, and about proposed and active responses to this situation. Seminar members will then use their understanding of the research issues they have considered when they review evidence relevant to individual paper topics. The major paper each student will write this term will provide the foundation for a comps paper, which is due midway through winter term. Students are free to write their papers on any topic of interest provided there is adequate grounding for the paper in existent psychological science literatures, but discussions of research in the papers should be informed by evaluative concerns raised in discussions of research credibility issues and in light of evolving research norms, standards, and procedures in science.

PSYC 399:
Professor: Larry Wichlinski

The Mind-Brain Interface

This capstone seminar will explore how the mind and brain interact in the generation of thought, feeling, and behavior. We will consider both how the brain generates mind and how the mind influences events in the brain. Topics we will explore include consciousness, attention, reward processes, motor skills learning, mental illness and psychotherapy, among others. 

The Comps Paper

In the winter term, students enroll in the integrative exercise (PSYC400, 3 credits). During this term, students independently revise and extend the fall term paper, integrating the feedback from their faculty advisor. Based on this work, students submit a final comps paper (approx. 20-25 pages) that makes original contributions to the field of psychology through critiquing existing psychology primary sources, applying empirically-supported psychological theories to new questions, generating potential applied guidelines, and/or proposing new theories or empirical studies based on published theories and empirical research. Final comps papers will be due by midterm Winter term.

Final comps papers are typically 20-25 pages of content. Papers can only go over 7500 words in body text (the beginning of the introduction to the end of the conclusion) if the student petitions the Psychology Department and receives approval.

This work is also presented at a psychology conference, either on or off campus (e.g., SuperFriday, MUPC, MidBrains, or a national conference).

Exemptions

Students wishing to complete an alternative comps project (i.e., an empirical research project) need to demonstrate independence and background knowledge in the suggested research area and must have faculty support for the project. They must submit a petition (2-3 pages, double-spaced) to the department chair by the end of the second week of spring term of junior year. The petition should include a written proposal for the proposed comps project, a proposed timeline for the project with deadlines, and a description of the format for the final scholarly product. We recommend conferring closely with a potential faculty advisor(s) when conceiving and writing the proposal.

Petitions will only be approved if they meet the following criteria:

  1. Enthusiastic faculty support for the project;
  2. Student knowledge of relevant background theories and research, sufficient for the student to independently proceed with additional exploration;
  3. Student familiarity with proposed research methods, either through literature or first-hand experience;
  4. A demonstrated history of independent work and motivation;
  5. Strong writing ability, and
  6. The research proposal is well-grounded in existing psychological theories and literature.

Note: Exemption comps are intended to be an opportunity for students to conduct independent research in place of the typical comps process. Therefore, literature reviews (akin to those one would write in PSYC399) are not able to serve as exemption comps.