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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.
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Hannah Cho

Dr. Cendri Hutcherson

Hannah's research interests encompass the cognitive and neural processes underlying decision making. Hannah is interested in how endogenous information, such as memory, interpretations of context, attitudes, and perspective taking, influence the choice process.
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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.
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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.
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Shernell Hines

Dr. Elizabeth Page-Gould

Shernell’s research interests centre around how everyday social interactions become compromised by intergroup anxiety. More specifically, she is interested in the perception of microaggressions, racial anxiety, rumination and the physiological responses associated with these psychological processes. Her current research takes an exploratory psychophysiological approach to examine and measure changes in stress levels during moments of high racial anxiety to see if it leads to rumination.
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Leo Huang

Dr. Elizabeth Page-Gould

I am a social psychology researcher with an interest in social networks and chatbots. My current research investigates people's social network and the roles that chatbots can play in it.
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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.
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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.
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Hanieh Naeimi

Dr. Emily Impett

Hanieh is interested in intercultural romantic relationships and how intercultural couples navigate their cultural differences. She is particularly interested in studying cultural sacrifices and their outcomes in these relationships.
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Gideon Park

Dr. Emily Impett

Gideon's primary research interest is in understanding the interplay between individual differences and contextual factors that shape the interpersonal dynamics of close relationships.
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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.
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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.
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Tayler Wells

Dr. Penelope Lockwood

Tayler's research explores romantic relationships, with a focus on what factors impact satisfaction and commitment to each other, and what interventions can bolster these outcomes. She is currently interested in how social media use impacts romantic relationships, and whether posting or consuming relationship-based content helps or hinders a partnership.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Victoria Oldemburgo De Mello

Dr. Michael Inzlicht

Victoria's research interests include social cognition, moral psychology, social networks, political behavior.
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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.
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Alexa Sacchi

Dr. Christina Starmans

Alexa's research is broadly related to the social cognitive development of children with specific interests in moral judgment, altruism, prosociality, moral responsibility, and ownership. Alexa's current projects investigate questions such as: "Why do we treat children and adults differently when they commit morally wrong actions?" and "How do children think we develop certain moral traits?"
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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.
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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.
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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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Aidan Campbell

Dr. Michael Inzlicht

Aidan is broadly interested in social cognition. His research largely focuses on motivation and exertion. He is currently investigating the effects of effort on meaning in life and trait-level differences in the meaning people ascribe to their efforts.
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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.
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Hannah Gans

Dr. Alison Chasteen

Hannah's research interests include ageism and intersectionality. More specifically, Hannah is interested in how age interacts with race and sex to bring about unique perceptions of intersectional groups.
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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.
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Joe Hoang

Dr. Spike Lee

Joe is interested in areas of Social Psychology relating to topics about social class, interpersonal relationships, prejudice and cross-cultural research.
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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.
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Cecilia Ma

Dr. Spike Lee

Cecilia is interested in morality and empathy through the lens of politics and culture. Specifically, her research lies in understanding and bridging the political divide by examining the social and psychophysical mechanisms that underlie political beliefs.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Emily Schwartzman

Dr. Nicholas Rule

Emily completed her undergraduate studies at McGill University and received her Bachelor's degree in 2019. Her research examines how person perception is influenced by intergroup processes, with a particular focus on the LGBTQ+ community.
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Sandrine Toudjui

Dr. Jason Plaks

My research focuses on how trust is formed, maintained, and repaired in human-AI interaction. I aim to uncover and understand the underlying psychological mechanisms/variables that increase human willingness to engage with machines or artificial intelligence.
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Louisa You

Dr. Elizabeth Page-Gould

Louisa is interested broadly in intergroup relations. Her work involves topics in intergroup contact, ideological groups, and outgroup perceptions. In another line of work, Louisa is exploring entitativity perceptions.
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Emily Zohar

Dr. Michael Inzlicht

Emily is interested in how incidental features such as social norms, physical environments, and digital tools impact productivity and goal pursuit. Her research explores how the space in which people work shapes effort allocation and how digital calendaring tools influence subjective experiences of goal progress. Her research combines experimental methods with real-world applications, aiming to design interventions that promote real-world positive behaviour change.
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