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Social Personality Research Group

Graduate Students List

Hanieh is a first-year doctoral student at the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Dr. Emily Impett. Her primary research interest is 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.

Hanieh Naeimi

Hanieh Naeimi

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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.

Reem Ayad

Reem Ayad

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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.

Hannah Gans

Hannah Gans

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

Joe Hoang

Joe

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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. I aim 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.

Rebekah Gelpi

Rebekah

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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.

Yitong Zhao

Yitong Zhao

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

Gideon Park

Gideon

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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.

Mac Morgan

Mac

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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.

Jaweria Qaiser

Jaweria

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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.

Victoria Pringle

Victoria

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Sonia's research interests are mainly focused on social comparisons in close platonic relationships. More specifically, Sonia is interested in exploring how social comparisons effects friendship closeness and quality over time. Additionally, her past research was broadly related to mixed affect, wise reasoning and well-being.

Sonia Vintan

Sonia Vintan

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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?"

Alexa Sacchi

Alexa

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Mateja is a PhD student in the Einstein Lab at the University of Toronto. She studies psychosocial stress and cognitive aging, with her primary research focus being on minority stress and dementia risk in sexual minority women. Her second line of research examines sex and gender differences in the effects of adverse childhood experiences on late life cognition. She has previously studied neuropathic pain in women with female genital cutting. Aside from research, she enjoys reading, hiking, and petting as many dogs as possible.

Mateja Perovic

Mateja

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Amanda is in the final year of her PhD in the UTSC clinical science program, and is completing her clinical residency at the Royal Hospital in Ottawa. Amanda is interested in interpersonal emotion regulation and in strengthening methodological practices in clinical psychology.

Amanda Ferguson

Amanda

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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.

Hannah Cho

Hannah

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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.

Mostafa Miandari Hossein

Mostafa

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Vicki studies wisdom scientifically. Specifically, I examine the cognitive and personality correlates of wisdom and hope to identify the nature of these relations.

Vicki Dong

Vicki

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Steph is from St. Paul, Minnesota and completed her undergraduate degree at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Before coming to the University of Toronto, she managed the Atkinson Behavioral Research Lab at the Rady School of Management, UCSD. Steph is interested in the effects of psychological threat on financial decision-making, attitudes towards scientific technologies, and moral judgment. She also enjoys cats, coffee, and glam rock.

Stephanie Schwartz

Stephanie

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Kristina's primary research interest is in romantic relationships, with a specific focus on how positive states can enhance relationship quality.

Kristina Schrage

Kristina

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Kyle started a PhD in Psychology at the University of Toronto this fall and is working under the supervision of Dr. Norman Farb. Kyle has experience in meditation techniques and is interested in studying interoception as it relates to contemplative practices as well as mental and physical health for his doctoral studies. He recently completed a MSc in Neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal where he studied the emotional processing of auditory stimuli, such as music and human vocalizations, using Magnetoecephalogaphy. Kyle completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Western Ontario where he was involved with mindfulness meditation research.

Kyle Logie-Hagen

Kyle

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Jacklyn is interested in using social psychology to explore how people interact with environmental issues by examining predictors of proenvironmental behaviour and identity. In her masters, she investigated the attitudes, behaviors, and emotions that predict voting for environmentally friendly candidates in national elections. In another line of work, Jacklyn is interested in exploring how we can increase environmentalist identities by first increasing proenvironmental behaviors.

Jacklyn Koyama

Jacklyn

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Nina uses techniques from Natural Language Processing to study issues in moral and political psychology. She is interested in the ways moral language is deployed by politicians and surrounding social issues.

Nina Wang

Nina Wang

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Laura Tian is a fourth year PhD student supervised by Dr. Nick Rule at the University of Toronto. Her research primarily focuses on the cognitive mechanisms and downstream consequences of nonverbal cues signaling attractiveness, competence, and group membership.

Laura Tian

Laura Tian

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Sue's current research examines how and why our moral judgments vary across different contexts. More specifically, she is interested in how norms in close relationships influence what we perceive as appropriate and inappropriate in dating. In another line of work, Sue is conducting a simulation study to evaluate the impacts of sample size on the type I error rates.

Sue Song

Sue

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Shayne is interested in both the history of psychology and the sociology of scientific knowledge. His primary research uses text analysis of academic journals to investigate knowledge transmission between psychology departments and business schools. Shayne's other lines of work include a historical analysis of the peace psychology movement as well as research on the link between attachment avoidance and internalized stigma in members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Shayne Sanscartier

Shayne

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Yoobin's primary research interest is in understanding factors contributing to well-being as a couple and as a single (unpartnered) person.

Yoobin Park

Yoobin

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Rebecca is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Dr. Emily Impett. Her primary research interest is in understanding how relationship processes and structural forces build up or break down couples' relationship quality and personal well-being, with specific interests in sacrifice, gender dynamics, and family work in romantic relationships.

Rebecca Horne

Rebecca

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Youval is researching pro-environmental attitudes and behavior change toward a sustainable lifestyle. He is investigating how to improve climate change communication by taking into account individual differences, and how to reduce the gap between intentions to act pro-environmentally and actually doing so.

Youval Aberman

Youval

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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.

Daniel Wilson

Daniel Wilson

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Nathan's primary research interest is to study the mechanisms that direct our resolution of prediction errors, and the affective and motivational components and consequences of this resolution.

Nathan Wheeler

Nathan Wheeler

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Yang is interested in social and moral decision making as well as the role of emotion in the formation of these socio-moral preferences. Yang's current work applies computational modelling to prosocial decision-making and emotion to understand the underlying processes that guide people’s choices.

Yi Yang Teoh

Yi Yang Teoh

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Jordana's research focuses on how characteristics such as race, age, and body size interact to shape perceptions of women’s femininity and their experiences of sexism. Jordana is also interested in how women are perceived when confronting sexism, particularly when sexism is benevolent.

Jordana Schiralli

Jordana

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Nathan's primary research interest is bridging the gap between relationship and sexuality research, with a specific interest in expanding the way we understand sexual quality. Nathan also have an interest in researching attachment, beliefs about marriage, power dynamics in relationships, and religion.

Nathan Leonhardt

Nathan

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Bethany works primarily with Dr. Rebecca Neel and examine how motivations and beliefs shape social judgment. More specifically, she investigates how goal relevance guides social perception and emotion: Whereas people perceived to threaten others’ goals may experience prejudice, people considered goal-irrelevant may be ignored and forgotten. Bethany also examine beliefs about who can vs. cannot change and the consequences of those beliefs within intergroup contexts.

Bethany Lassetter

Bethany

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Rachel's primary research interests focus on morality, specifically individuals’ perceptions of others’ unethical behaviour. She is interested in how moral outrage is influenced by social-relational factors like a perpetrator's power or an observer's closeness to a perpetrator. She also investigates whether and how individuals can be seen as redeemed after acting unethically.

Rachel Forbes

Rachel

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Norhan is interested in whether people know who they are and how other people experience them. She is also interested in how people acquire this knowledge and how it affects their well-being and interpersonal relationships.

Norhan Elsaadawy

Norhan

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Veronica's interests lie very broadly in the area of prejudice and stereotyping. My primary research focuses on religious and non-religious group biases. She is also working on projects involving stereotype intersectionality, where I am investigating how intersecting identities affect stereotype content.

Veronica Bergstrom

Veronica

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Suraiya's research focuses on the cognitive processes contributing to social categorization, stereotyping, and prejudice. This includes a focus on how we categorize others into social groups (e.g. when will we attend to dimensions like race vs. gender as a function of our motivations) and the implications of this categorization process for behaviour. She is also interested in how people weigh self-interest with group-interest, and how the presence of self-other trade-offs can influence typically seen patterns of intergroup bias in decision-making.

Suraiya Allidina

Suraiya

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Broadly, Angela's research interests include the ways in which emotion and emotion regulation are influenced by socioeconomic and cultural factors, and how that, in turn, influences physical and psychological health. Additionally, she is interested in the ways that beliefs about emotions affect our behaviours, and the role that emotion regulation plays in the contexts of politics and activism.

Angela Smith

Angela

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Natalie is currently a PhD student under the primary supervision of Dr. Emily Impett. Her primary research interest is in close relationships, interpersonal regulation, and well-being. She is particularly interested in the ways that people attempt to regulate the emotions and behaviours of close others (e.g., romantic partners, children) and the benefits and costs of these pursuits for personal and interpersonal outcomes.

Natalie Sisson

Natalie

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Joel researches how members of stigmatized groups experience and navigate intergroup contexts, how to leverage insights from this and other social-psychological research to solve real-world problems, and the quantitative methods we use along the way.

Joel LeForestier

Joel

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Arasteh is agraduate student in Social/Personality psychology and received her undergraduate degree from the University of Toronto. Her primary research interests focus on exploring emotion regulation in stressful contexts and the impact of emotion/emotion regulation on both psychological and physical health.

Arasteh Gatchpazian

Arasteh

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Greg is a PhD Candidate working with Dr. Michael Inzlicht at the University of Toronto. In his research he takes a multimethod approach to addressing questions about empathy, prosocial effort, and subjective well-being. His MA research, now In Press at Psychological Science, is focused on how people experience empathy in everyday life--including constructs like emotion sharing, perspective taking, and compassion--and how these are related to important outcomes such as subjective well-being and prosocial behaviour. His work further explores whether it may be adaptive or strategic to focus on some aspects of the empathy experience rather than others in certain circumstances, and why some empathy cues are noticed and responded to, while others are missed or ignored. In addition, he is interested in when and why people decide to invest effort for others, given that effort is aversive and often avoided.

Greg Depow

Greg

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Yiyi's research focuses on mindfulness and its impact on people’s physical and mental well-being, particularly on how technology-based mindfulness practice can change individuals’ psychological flexibility, emotion regulation, value seeking, and motivation.

Yiyi Wang

Yiyi Wang

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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.

Emily Schwartzman

Emily

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Models of prosociality towards strangers have been rooted in the inhibition of self-interest for centuries, with a plethora of contemporary experimental work continuing to observe self-inhibiton as central to the production of prosocial behaviour towards strangers. Yet, Anthony's research suggests that prosocial behaviour towards strangers is critically dependent on the upregulation of the other more so than inhibition of the self. This mechanism of other-upregulation held explanatory power beyond prosociality to include the production of antisocial behaviour as well, suggesting this mechanism may support the translation of both prosocial and antisocial motivation into behaviour. Avenues of upcoming exploration include whether such a mechanism provides explanatory power within intergroup contexts.

Anthony Romyn

Anthony

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Elizabeth's research interests include self-concept and identity.

Elizabeth Long

Elizabeth

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Yachen is interested in how emotions interact with rational cognitive processes. More specifically, her 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.

Yachen Li

Yachen

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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.

Siobhan Flanagan

Siobhan

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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.

Louisa You

Louisa You

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

Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello

Victoria

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Cecilia graduated from Queen’s University with a BScH in Psychology. She is interested in how social and physical states affect judgements, intuitions, and unconscious processes related to morality and empathy, especially through the lens of politics and culture.

Cecilia Ma

Cecilia

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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.

Elia Lam

Elia

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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 Derbyshire

Kailtlin

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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.

Aidan Campbell

Aidan

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