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Graduate Students
Leif Anderson
Leif's primary research interests broadly cover interpersonal understanding (e.g., empathy) and how power influences relationship dynamics. His primary research focuses on how empathy is perceived and what motivates empathy in different contexts. Leif is also interested in how we come to understand something as reasonable, interpret different political and religious documents, and humanize other peoples' experiences.
Elizabeth Chan
Elizabeth is interested in studying how to optimize time and space to improve quality of life. In one line of research, she examines how (mis)balancing time to different activities like work, screen time, and sleep is associated with well-being. In another line of research, she examines how physical spaces, including aspects of the built environment, are linked to well-being. She adopts a wide variety of methodologies, including from computational social sciences, to test these questions.
Éloïse Côté
Éloïse is a PhD student working under the supervision of Dr. Yoel Inbar in the Morality, Affect, and Politics (MAP) lab. Broadly, she is interested in topics related to morality, ideology, technology, and polarization. In her research, she uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to examine politicians’ moral rhetoric on social media.
Siobhan Flanagan
Siobhan's research interests broadly involve online social interactions and conversation. Specifically, she compares online and in person conversations in their potential to facilitate productive dialogue and the negotiation of differences between pairs. She is also interested in the topic misinformation circulation in virtual spaces, and the ways in which strong attitudes are formed and maintained.
Amy Gourley
Amy is broadly interested in examining how age-related stigma is adopted and maintained across the lifespan. She aims to investigate factors that impact the internalization and the endorsement of ageism towards older adults. Currently, she's investigating the moderating effects of intergenerational contact and subjective age on younger adults' endorsement of age-related stigma.
Elaine Hoan
Elaine's research focuses on experiences in singlehood, specifically as they relate to well-being. She is particularly interested in the ways that individual differences (e.g., personality, attachment) and demographics (e.g., gender, country) shape well-being across relationship status.
Elia Lam
Broadly, Elia’s research interests include: intergroup relations and culture, beliefs about change (malleability beliefs), and self-regulation. More specifically, Elia is interested in how beliefs about change can impact both the self and intergroup relations. Elia is also interested in social invisibility and whether differing expectations or goals can shape the experience of feeling invisible or mitigate negative outcomes.
Sandy Luu
Sandy’s work primarily centers around mindfulness training, self-regulatory behaviours, and holistic well-being. Sandy is especially interested in examining how perfectionism influences decision-making and identity, as well as the effects of mindful awareness on cognitive flexibility. Her past projects focused on leveraging digital health tools and psychotherapy models to design interactive interventions, which she is looking forward to applying in her current research.
Ashmita Mazumder
Dr. Suzanne Erb & Dr. Marc Fournier
My research broadly focuses on impulsivity. More specifically, I am interested in the measurement of impulsivity and how certain situational factors (e.g., stress, unpredictability, complexity of the situation) can affect this behavior. With Drs. Suzanne Erb and Marc Fournier, I will be experimentally exploring hypotheses that attempt to explain the low correspondence between self-report and behavior measures of this construct.
Layla Mondol
Layla is widely interested in moral judgement and decision making. She is currently investigating how emotional perception/sensitivity fluctuates in people day to day and its role in prosocial and altruistic behaviour. She is also interested in moral judgements we make towards "bad" victims and how stereotypes about low- and high-SES groups bias everyday moral calls. A personal research interest of hers is gambling psychology. She is mainly interested in finding ways to curb our natural instincts in order to be more progressive individuals!
Jesse Reid
Jesse's primary research interests include political psychology and environmental psychology, and often, the overlap between these two areas. More specifically, he investigates how to best frame information about the environment and climate change in ways that hold appeal across the political spectrum - such as by considering underlying conservative ideologies (e.g., Right-Wing Authoritarianism, Social Dominance Orientation, etc.) and values.
Sarah Scott
Sarah's research interests include stress and trauma in specific populations. In addition, Sarah's research projects will focus on interventions (i.e., therapeutic horticulture) to support the mental and physical wellbeing of individuals, specifically undergraduate students. In addition, Sarah has worked with frontline officers to improve their stress physiology and performance in high stress situations and will continue to work on projects relating to improving stress responses in first responders.
Tayler Wells
Tayler’s research primarily focuses on close relationships and social media use. She examines how social media use may affect relationship quality, with particular interest in its potential to enhance satisfaction. She is also interested in a variety of other topics related to close relationships, with current projects exploring well-being in singlehood and sexual compromise.
Yitong Zhao
Yitong is primarily interested in emotion regulation, well-being, and social relationships. Specifically, she studies individuals’ regulation processes in pursuing personal and social goals, especially processes shaped by their beliefs, values, and dispositions, and situated in regulation contexts of varying characteristics.
Reem Ayad
Reem’s primary research interest is moral judgment. More specifically, Reem is interested in how certain qualities about the actor (e.g., their intentionality, competence, usefulness to us, etc.) can influence our moral judgments of them. With Dr. Plaks, Reem is exploring these questions within the context of human-robot interaction.
Ashley Dhillon
Ashley is interested to investigate cross-cultural variations in gender development, primarily in the areas of child and adolescent gender identity, essentialist thinking about gender, and psychosocial outcomes of gender-nonbinary children. Her doctoral research also focuses on how gender-diverse and cisgender children in Thailand conceptualize and reason about gender, and how this might compare to children raised in Western, Education, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies.
Ziqi Fu
Ziqi Fu is a PhD student interested in cognitive effort, self control and decision making. Her past projects focused on context effects in effort-based choices and effort aversion, such as the sunk-cost effect in effort-based decision making. She has also studied individual differences in cognitive strategy selection and risky decision making. Her work uses cognitive experiments and computational modeling to explain why people start, persist, or avoid demanding cognitive tasks. Through her PhD training, Ziqi aims to bridge lab-born theories of self-control with everyday goal pursuit.
Zachary Grey
My primary research interests are in moral judgment, moral disagreement, and perceptions of moral character. Currently I am working on a project aimed at understanding moral disagreement in everyday life. Specifically, I am interested in the context in which these disagreements occur, their content, and their associated consequences for people and relationships.
Noah Laskey
Noah is a social psychology student working with Spike Lee. He is interested in how group memberships, morality, personal identity, and extremism interact within the political landscape, how cognitive styles and uncertainty intolerance give rise to rigid partisanship, as well as how authoritarianism manifests across dynamic contexts, both within and beyond the political sphere.
Mostafa Miandarihossein
Mostafa's research focus is on using computational models to study humans’ decision-making and learning. He is fascinated by humans’ and animals’ ability to show flexible and adaptive behavior, even with a limited amount of experience in a world full of uncertainties. How this ability work is the “big question” that he has in my mind. As a half-scientist, half-engineer, this question is appealing to my both sides. Mostafa considers this ability to be one of the finest alchemies of the brain, so the scientist in me wants to find the answer with passion. Moreover, uncovering new findings related to this question can be an essential component in the AI-neuroscience virtuous circle, which his engineer side wants to be a part of.
Elina Moreno
Elina is a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, in the Relationships and Well-being lab, supervised by Dr. Emily Impett. Elina's primary research interest is in how mutual understanding between partners contributes to relationship effort, specifically pertaining to communication and relationship maintenance strategies.
Victoria Pringle
Broadly, Victoria is interested in how people perceive others, including how people use physical cues to form impressions, what it means to know and be known by someone, and how impression formation differs in an online context. Victoria is also interested in morbid curiosity, recreational horror, authenticity, and morality.
Alexa Sacchi
Alexa's research focuses on social cognition and morality. Alexa's dissertation work focuses on extensions of the "end of history illusion," investigating how children and adults perceive themselves and others changing over time. Their other work investigates uncertainty monitoring in the moral domain, group dynamics of moral decision-making, and investigating those who engage in costly, real world moral decisions.
Anil Topal
Anil is a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, supervised by Dr. Emily Impett. His research focuses on understanding the interplay between life events and close relationships, with a particular interest in exploring interdependent processes in couples following pregnancy loss.
Josh Costa
Josh is broadly interested in how, and to what extent, social media positively and negatively affect various aspects of our lives (e.g., well-being, self-esteem, social connectedness, etc.). He is particularly interested in the relationships between social media use, social comparisons, and narcissism. Research suggests that narcissism is on the rise, so what role might social media be playing? How might online social comparisons contribute to this relationship? Josh’s research aims to explore such questions.
Karina Feng
Karina is interested in how social and built environments shape well-being at the population level. Her past work examined the relationship between racial composition and life satisfaction, and she looks forward to expanding this research to explore how urban design affects collective well-being. She is also interested in leveraging big team science to improve our ability to understand, predict, and respond to national shifts in well-being.
Shernell Hines
Shernell is a Ph.D student in Social/ Personality Psychology. Her research interests centre around the relationship between emotions and well-being with an interdisciplinary focus on how this can improve Women’s Health. She is particularly interested in self-conscious emotions (i.e., pride, shame, guilt, envy, embarrassment), self-transcendent emotions (i.e., awe, gratitude, inspiration), and their impact on self-concept, well-being, and physiological processes.
Whitney Mambou
Whitney Mambou is a PhD student at the Self-Knowledge and Interpersonal (SKIP) Lab under the supervision of Dr. Erika Carlson. She is broadly interested in the cues and tools people use to signal information about themselves and the cues and tools people use to infer information about others, both online and offline, both accurately and inaccurately. In the past, she has examined impression formation and cue utilization in online dating, impression updating among strangers, and attachment in close friendships. She is currently examining how people perceive and experience authenticity, more specifically, how our perceptions differ when we judge authenticity within ourselves versus in others.
Jawahir Mohamed
Jawahir is broadly interested in examining how Black Canadian emerging adults make sense of their racial identity and how this relates to their personality development and well-being during university. She is passionate about using an intersectional lens, along with mixed methods and community-engaged research approaches, to ensure that this work is collaborative, meaningful, and responsive to the realities of Black students in the Greater Toronto Area.
Mac Morgan
Mac is interested in social perception in limited contexts (such as at a distance or in online forums) the intersection of person perception, technology, and well-being. For example, how does our online behavior affect perceptions of flourishing or floundering? Mac is also interested more generally in how variations in adherence to cultural norms shape the inferences we make about one another.
Sofia Panasiuk
Sofia is interested in the operationalization and measurement of well-being beyond psychometric validation. She uses a mix of idiographic/nomothetic and qualitative/quantitative methods to better understand what well-being consists of for individuals and groups and what contributes to it.
Jaweria Qaiser
Jaweria's primary research interests focus on what compels individuals to cooperate and coordinate at the dyadic and group levels, factors influencing such coordination, and how such coordination, or lack thereof, influences wellbeing. She is especially interested in the role of prosocial emotions and its physiological underpinnings. Her past work has investigated physiological sharing at the dyadic level during compassionate contexts.
Stella Zhang
Stella is interested in using a narrative approach to understand how shifts in cultural context through processes such as immigration and displacement impact the development of people’s identity, personality, and well-being. Specifically, she is interested in understanding how people narrate key events in their life (e.g., migration journey, engagement with new social structures), how their personal stories relate to broader master narratives, and how narration facilitates the integration of these experiences into their identity. She is excited to collaborate with people from immigrant and refugee communities in the GTA to do this work.
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