Rate My Professor Donald Tellinghuisen

Donald Tellinghuisen serves as Department Chair and Professor of Psychology at Calvin University, where he teaches Introduction to Psychology, Fundamentals of Research and Practice, Cognitive Psychology, and Experimental Psychology. Prior to his appointment at Calvin, he taught for seven years at Augustana College in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, as Associate Professor from 1993 to 2000, and has held the position of full Professor at Calvin since August 2000. Born in North Dakota and raised in Iowa, Tellinghuisen earned his BA in psychology from Northwestern College in Orange City, Iowa, followed by an MA in 1991 and a PhD in 1994 in human experimental psychology from the University of Iowa, specializing in attention and vision. His research interests focus on attention and distractibility, individual differences in attention, decision making, and cognition, including visuospatial attention, memory, and visual attention. He also collaborates on projects such as water taste perception with the Calvin Clean Water Institute and consistently involves undergraduate students in his research.

Tellinghuisen has co-authored the book Exploring Psychology and Christian Faith: An Introductory Guide with Paul Moes, which integrates biblical themes of human nature with major areas of psychology and serves as a textbook at Calvin University and other Christian colleges, with over 11,000 copies of the first edition sold; the second edition was updated in 2023. He is currently developing a book on the role of attention systems in faith life. His 19 peer-reviewed publications, cited over 500 times, appear in journals including Developmental Psychology, Perception & Psychophysics, and Patient Education and Counseling. Key works include "Examining in Infancy: Does it Reflect Active Processing?" (1994, with L.M. Oakes), "The Inability to Ignore Auditory Distractors as a Function of Visual Task Perceptual Load" (2003, with E.J. Nowak), and "Now Hear This: Inattentional Deafness Depends on Task Relatedness" (2016, with A.J. Cohen and N.J. Cooper). Through his scholarship, Tellinghuisen advances cognitive psychology, particularly attention mechanisms, bridging empirical research with Christian perspectives on human behavior.