Oakland University Psi Chi

By Christina Randall

Dr. Taku is a professor here at Oakland University who is interested in the area of posttraumatic growth.  Posttraumatic growth is defined as a positive change experienced as a result of the struggle with a major life crisis or traumatic event and is the outcome as well as the process of growth through a person’s traumatic experience.  Overall, Dr. Taku is interested in how people change after traumatic events as well as how we can help those who have survived the traumatic events in history.  She is very interested in how people grow, cope, and react to trauma in different ways.  Through posttraumatic growth, people can grow in areas such as relating to others (i.e. having a greater sense of closeness to others), experiencing new possibilities (i.e. developing new interests), finding personal strength (i.e. having a greater feeling of self-reliance), experiencing spiritual change (i.e. having a stronger religious faith), and finding appreciation of life (i.e. changing one’s priorities about what is important in life).  The goal of Dr. Taku’s research is to study the cross-cultural characteristics of posttraumatic growth as well as its predictors.

Dr. Taku has quite a story to tell when she is asked how she first became interested in psychology, specifically the area of posttraumatic growth.  Dr. Taku started off as an undergraduate at Kobe University in Japan, majoring in education.  However, as a junior in college, she experienced an enormous earthquake which killed 6,434 people, injured 43,792, and left 3 people missing.  As a result of the earthquake, 150,000 houses were destroyed and many lives were impacted.  After experiencing the earthquake, Dr. Taku changed her major to psychology and continued her education at Nagoya University to receive her Ph.D.  After her education at Nagoya University, she traveled to the United States from Japan to continue her Post-Doctoral work at UNC Charlotte and then came here to Oakland University.

In addition to posttraumatic growth, Dr. Taku is also interested in cross-cultural psychology, clinical psychology, and statistics.  Her current and future goals of research in the area of posttraumatic growth are to encourage people to express emotions or feelings (negative psychological symptoms as well as positive psychological growth) and to encourage professionals to find the bridge to growth instead of psychologists obsessing over how to simply reduce the negative symptoms.  Dr. Taku hopes that from her research people learn that each psychological construct can be defined differently.  Dr. Taku wants to give participants in her research a chance to define themselves and then collect data instead of the participants being defined by someone else.  From her own research, Dr. Taku has learned how research should connect to each other and that her specific area of research is a part of history.  Additionally, her research area is closely related to Piaget as well as current researchers.  Dr. Taku has learned so much through research and believes that students should get involved in research without a doubt.  In the time she has spent at Oakland University, she has enjoyed working with her research assistants so much.  They have helped her to build up her research as well as make it more scientific, and she says she couldn’t have done any research without her research assistants along the way. Dr. Taku feels that research is an energetic job and is something to be proud of, and if you are interested in becoming a psychologist, you should definitely get involved.