Dr. Tamara J Ferguson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology

Tamara J. Ferguson received her Ph.D. in social psychology in 1980 at the University of Alberta in Canada. She was a faculty member in the Division of Developmental Psychology for eight years at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands. She taught a variety of courses there in Dutch, including introduction to development, social and personality development, psychosocial problems during youth and adolescence, developmental psychopathology, and the development of religious thought. In 1988, she decided to return to the U.S. and joined the faculty at Utah State University. At USU, she taught the general psychology class, and the graduate and undergraduate classes in social psychology. Her research interests include the development of emotion and emotion regulation, the development of peer relations, and the effects of serious illness on parenting.
She adores her husband, her two nieces, her animals, children, historical novels, southern Utah deserts, mountains, biking, skiing (even though she is really lousy at it!), and tolerates her husband’s obsessions with sailing and electric cars. She rates Lion in Winter as the best film she’s ever seen, with Amelie, Chicago, Ordinary People, and Moulin Rouge all tied in second place. Arturo Perez-Reverte and Ian Pears are her favorite novelists (with Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost winning the Nobel Prize if she could be on the selection panel). Her taste in music dates her, so we couldn’t coax her to reveal too much in that area. She will admit to loving any song that Eva Cassidy or Sting perform. Her favorite bumper sticker is “My Karma Just Ran Over Your Dogma,” but she wishes we would all live our lives according to the Buddhist expression that goes something like “I am the other and the other is me.” She wishes the public would ponder Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, as well as all of Frans de Waal’s work (especially Chimpazee Politics), since both are so revealing about “human” nature. Her dislikes include Bill Maher’s show being cancelled, servers going down, standing in line, plagiarism, and most shows on TV these days. Stay tuned in the chat sessions for her phobias and “most embarrassing moments.”