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Graduate Students
Leif Anderson
Dr. Andre Wang
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
Dr. Felix Cheung
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.
Kaitlin Derbyshire
Dr. Penelope Lockwood
Kaitlin's past research investigated whether explicit-implicit attitudinal ambivalence about individuals’ romantic partner and relationship predicted their jealousy and commitment levels. She is interested in what attracts individuals to their partners, strengthens and weakens relationships, and how social comparisons influence how people feel about their relationships.
Kaitlin's past research investigated whether explicit-implicit attitudinal ambivalence about individuals’ romantic partner and relationship predicted their jealousy and commitment levels. She is interested in what attracts individuals to their partners, strengthens and weakens relationships, and how social comparisons influence how people feel about their relationships.
Zachary Grey
Dr. Yoel Inbar & Dr. Paul Bloom
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
Dr. Spike Lee
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.
Mac Morgan
Dr. Nicholas Rule
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
Dr. Felix Cheung
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
Dr. Jenny Stellar
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.
Reem Ayad
Dr. Jason Plaks
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
Dr. Doug VanderLaan
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.
Rebekah Gelpi
Dr. William Cunningham
Groups are a fundamental component of humans’ social existence, so it should come as no surprise to learn that belonging to a group affects your attitudes, beliefs, and behaviours. However, these effects are often thought of as biased or irrational, rather than being uniquely suited to people’s life history and development. Rebekah aims to use approaches from computational cognitive science to understand children’s and adults’ basic cognitive architecture, the mechanisms with which it supports preferential learning from groups, and how it may lead to the discounting and derogation of non-group members.
Yachen Li
Dr. Jenny Stellar
Yachen is interested in how emotions interact with rational cognitive processes. More specifically, Yachen's interests focus on self-transcendent emotions (i.e. awe, elevation) – their physiological correlates, and their effect on social cognition and decision-making. In a related line a research, she is interested in how people update their judgment of other people’s moral characters in light of mixed positive and negative moral information.
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.
Jesse Reid
Dr. Yoel Inbar
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
Dr. Judith Anderson
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
Dr. Penelope Lockwood
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.
Stella Zhang
Dr. Joanne Chung
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.
Éloïse Côté
Dr. Yoel Inbar
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
Dr. Elizabeth Page-Gould
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
Dr. Alison Chasteen
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
Dr. Geoff MacDonald
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
Dr. Rebecca Neel
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.
Elizabeth Long
Dr. Erika Carlson & Dr. Marc Fournier
Broadly speaking, Elizabeth is interested in the various routes that people take to acquiring self-knowledge, as well as the causes and consequences of doing so more vs. less effectively. She is also interested in metascience & philosophy of science, and what it means to have good theories of psychological phenomena.
Mostafa Miandarihossein
Dr. Cendri Hutcherson
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.
Victoria Pringle
Dr. Erika Carlson
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
Dr. Christina Starmans
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
Dr. Emily Impett
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.
Daniel J. Wilson
Dr. Cendri Hutcherson
Daniel's current research focus is to develop tools to better measure and predict the intention-behavior gap. His earlier work combines behavioral experimentation with neuro-imaging and computational modeling in an effort to gain a deeper understanding of our decision making processes–and how these processes may sometimes err. Other general areas of interest include understanding the disconnect between our current world and that for which our brain evolved, cognitive science applied to public policy, and the effects of online advertising on well-being.
Yitong Zhao
Dr. Brett Ford
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.
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