Rate My Professor Kimberly Wear Jones

Dr. Kimberly Wear Jones serves as Associate Professor of Psychology at High Point University, a position she has held since 2003, and chairs the university's Institutional Review Board. She earned her Ph.D. in Experimental/Cognitive Psychology from the University of Texas at Arlington in 2003, with a dissertation entitled "An Un-Inhibited View of Homograph Processing." Prior to that, she received her M.S. in Experimental Psychology from the same institution in 2000, focusing her thesis on "The Effects of Emotional Arousal on Memory for Verbal Material," and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Tennessee in 1995. During her graduate studies at UTA, Jones taught undergraduate and graduate courses including Psychological Statistics, Experimental Psychology Lab, and Statistics Labs. Her teaching portfolio at High Point University encompasses Introduction to Psychology, Psychological Statistics, Research Methods in Psychology, Advanced Research Methods, Cognitive Psychology, Biopsychology, Theories of Learning & Memory, Language & Thought (Psycholinguistics), and Cognitive Aging.

Jones's primary research interests center on human learning and memory, examining facilitative and inhibitory processes that underlie memory encoding and retrieval at both theoretical and applied levels. Her work explores how unwanted memories are discarded when irrelevant to the current task, with a recent shift toward processes in young and older adults. Current projects include the production effect, demonstrating that words written during study are better recalled than those read aloud or silently across age groups, conducted in collaboration with Dr. Stacy Lipowski; mental exercises using board games to engage working memory components in older adults, showing improved post-test scores with frequent participation; and community outreach initiatives with local senior centers on memory changes, nutrition for cognition, and technology use. She has earned recognition including the Outstanding Faculty Member award from High Point University's Evening Degree Program in 2006, Graduate Research Award Scholarships in 2000 and 2002, and University Scholar status at UTA in 2002. Jones has contributed extensively through conference presentations, such as posters at Psychonomic Society Annual Meetings on topics like retrieval-induced forgetting and facilitation (2019), homograph processing (2017, 2015), and exploring written production benefits in older adults (Wear Jones et al., 2022), alongside earlier works on emotional arousal effects and priming.