Paul Whitney

Paul Whitney is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Washington State University and currently serves as Interim Vice President for International Programs. His research focuses on cognitive mechanisms underlying memory, affect, and decision-making processes, with specialization in sleep deprivation effects.

Educational Background:

• Ph.D., University of Kansas, 1984

Dr. Whitney's work investigates how sleep loss disrupts the integration of emotional and cognitive information during executive function and risky decision-making. He developed the Temporary Amnesia from Sleep Loss (TASL) framework to explain cognitive consequences of sleep deprivation, examining working memory deficits and attentional control failures through collaborative neuroscience approaches. His research spans laboratory experiments with adolescents to population-level health studies.

Analysis of his 2022-2024 publications reveals consistent interdisciplinary focus on sleep-cognition interactions, combining experimental psychology with public health perspectives. Key themes include adolescent cognitive vulnerability to sleep restriction, mortality risk associations with sleep patterns, and physiological markers of sleep-deprived affective processing, demonstrating methodological diversity from controlled lab tasks to large-scale epidemiological analysis.