Paul Miller

Paul Miller is an associate professor of psychology in New College's School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He received a doctorate in educational psychology in 1984 from the University of Texas where he was honored with the Ben Futcher Award for dissertation excellence. He earned his first master's degree in school psychology from North Carolina State University in 1974 and a second master's degree in program evaluation from the University of Texas in 1980. His bachelor's degree in psychology was awarded by St. Vincent College in Latrobe, Penn. 

Miller came to the Psychology Department at ASU in 1985, as a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Postdoctoral Research Fellow, to conduct research on the socialization of children's empathy and prosocial behavior. Upon completing this fellowship, he was granted a research fellowship in 1987 through a National Institute of Mental Health Training Grant to the Prevention Research Center to study the socialization of children's coping with divorce-related stressful events. He joined the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences on the West campus of ASU in 1988.

Miller has conducted research on the socialization of empathy and coping in children and the relation of empathy to moral reasoning in children. His research has focused on socialization processes that facilitate children's learning of strategies for coping with stressful life events, such as divorce, interparental conflict, parental job loss and natural disasters. As an Investigator on a NIMH-funded grant on "Child and Family Adaptation to Parental Job Loss," he also has studied cross-cultural differences in coping socialization processes. His current research focuses on the influence of personality and past experiences on individuals’ cognitive processing of information in everyday stressful event scenes, such as natural disasters, police victimization, child bullying, child distress and family conflict.

Miller is widely published, and his work on the socialization of empathy and the relation of empathy to moral reasoning in children has appeared in major developmental journals such as Developmental Psychology, Child Development, and Merrill-Palmer Quarterly. He has also appeared within the pages of the Psychological Bulletin, Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, Qualitative Psychology, and the Journal of Child and Family Studies. His current publications have focused on maternal-child communication patterns that affect children’s recall and use of suggested coping strategies for dealing with interparental conflict and family and child coping in the context of natural disasters, specifically wildfires and tornados.

His areas of teaching specialization include developmental psychology, social development, stress and coping, and developmental psychopathology. As a licensed psychologist in the state of Arizona, Miller directs the undergraduate internship program at ASU's West campus in which psychology majors receive practical work experiences in mental health, social service, and educational agencies across the metro-Phoenix area.