POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWS
Dr. MATTHEW
BACHMAN
Dr. Fred Duong is a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Jennifer Stellar. His research centers on emotions, morality, and political intergroup relations. Specifically, he investigates the meaning and measurement of empathy, cross-partisan conversations, and prosocial consequences of gratitude. Fred earned his master's degree from New York University and completed his PhD from Northeastern University.
Key words: behavior, decision-making, empathy, emotions, gratitude, morality, prosociality
Dr. TONY GUTENTAG
Tony is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and the University of Melbourne. Her work centers on emotion, motivation, and education. In one line of work, she investigates how beliefs about the controllability of emotion shape student test anxiety, affecting their well-being and performance.
Key words: Emotion, Motivation, Education, Psychometrics
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Dr. Azadeh HajiHosseini is a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Cendri Hutcherson. Dr. HajiHosseini is interested in the neural correlates of decision making and self-regulation. She studies the role of EEG oscillations in these processes using multiple methods including machine learning and computational models.
Key words: decision making, EEG, learning, machine learning, NPL, regret, self-control
Dr. Matthew Bachman is a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Cendri Hutcherson. His research primarily investigates how attention can modulate decision making and other cognitive processes. He pursues these research questions using a variety of tools, including EEG/ERP, fMRI, eye tracking, and computational modeling.
Key words: decision making, attention, EEG, fMRI, eye-tracking, neuroimaging
Dr. Francine Karmali is SSHRC funded postdoctoral fellow at University of Toronto, St.George Campus, also working with the Engendering Success in STEM research consortium. Dr. Karmali received her PhD from York University, working with Dr. Kerry Kawakami. Trained in Social-Cognition, Dr. Karmali uses a multi-method approach to investigate intergroup relations and the processes by which social categorization forms and maintains biases in how we think, feel, and behave towards others, especially equity-seeking groups. For example, Dr. Karmali has investigated how the race of a person can impact other people's interpretations of their nonverbal behavior, or how witnesses respond to acts of bias against them.
Key words: Intergroup processes, Social Cognition, Person Perception, Nonverbal Behaviour, Diversity And Equity, Psychophysiology
Dr. Brett Mercier is a SSHRC funded postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Yoel Inbar. His research applies social psychological theories to current social issues. He has studied public reactions to mass shootings, why people support or oppose economic inequality, how people misunderstand their political opponents, and why people believe in God. Brett is a proponent of open science.
Key words: Politics, Religion, Heuristics, Biases, Decision-making, Open Science
Dr. Jacklyn Koyama is a post-doctoral fellow with UofT’s Data Science Institute. In her current role, she is using machine learning as a novel analysis tool to address questions about psychophysiological experiences of both social stress, and familiarity-based memory. In particular, she uses machine learning to identify specific stress and memory-based experiences using heart rate variability data, with a focus on developing analysis tools that can be integrated with existing theory and research in social and neuro-psychophysiology. Her research interests also cover ideological intergroup dynamics and social experiences of women in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields.
Key words: machine learning, psychophysiology, ideology, intergroup dynamics, gender
Dr. Ian Roberts is a postdoctoral fellow in the Decision Neuroscience Lab. His research examines the role of emotions in decision-making and uses a variety of methods, including: computational modeling, eye-tracking, EEG, and fMRI.
Key words: computational modeling, decision-making, emotion, eye-tracking, neuroimaging, pharmacology, psychophysiology
Dr. Eri Sasaki is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto working with Dr. Emily Impett. Her research examines a range of dyadic processes including couples’ emotional and behavioral dynamics during relationship interactions. She uses rich methodologies to test how dyadic dynamics emerge in observations of couples’ interactions, daily life, and across time.
Key words: close relationships, dyadic, communication, emotion, conflict, sacrifice
Dr. KATY TAM
Katy Tam is interested in what helps people regulate boredom adaptively in this increasingly distracting world. She completed her joint PhD degree at the University of Hong Kong and King’s College London in 2022, investigating the relationships between boredom beliefs, experience, coping and well-being. Her recent research interest focuses on boredom and technology use. For example, what are the effects of media multitasking? How does social media shape people’s daily affective experience? Katy hopes this work helps further the understanding of how to forge a healthier relationship with technologies in everyday life.
I received my PhD in Social/Personality Psychology (with a minor in Quantitative Methods) from the University of British Columbia, and I am currently a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Toronto.
I study how nonverbal communication—movements of the body, head, and face—can guide who becomes a leader and who gets overlooked. I rely on a variety of methods, including structured group interactions, human-robot interactions, experiments, and longitudinal designs, while leveraging different measurement and analytical techniques including nonverbal behavioral coding, peer-reports, machine learning, and psychophysiology. To examine the generalizability of my findings I explore these questions around the globe and across ages, including in non-western and small-scale traditional societies, and children as young as two.
Key words: nonverbal, leadership, quantitative methods, psychopathology, cross-cultural