Lab Director
My research examines how the subjective, physiological, and behavioural levels of experience all play into the way we perceive and organise knowledge about the social world. My four major lines of research include: (1) cross-group friendship; (2) intergroup contact and social interaction; (3) intergroup factors in chronic stress and health; (4) the role of physiological experience in social decision-making. To answer these questions, my research simultaneously combines dyadic, psychophysiological, longitudinal, social cognitive, behavioural, self-report, and quantitative methods to provide a comprehensive understanding of the factors that affect the way people navigate their social worlds.
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Primary Graduate Students
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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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I am interested in social networks, well-being, and consciousness. My current projects involve identifying social cliques within individuals’ ego-networks, understanding how social support and social networks contribute to one’s intention-behavior gap, and analyzing normative scientific communication behaviors. In my free time, I am an avid volleyball player!
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Abdullah received their BSc Honours in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They are mainly interested in how people’s intersecting social identities influence their experience and how they are perceived. They are specifically interested in social invisibility and how people with multiple marginalized identities experience invisibility. Abdullah is also interested in leveraging negative experiences of marginalized groups through intergroup contact, intra-minority interactions and stigma-based solidarity.
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I am interested broadly in intergroup relations. My work involves topics in intergroup contact, ideological groups, and outgroup perceptions. For my Master’s thesis, I am interested in how to increase intergroup contact between political groups. Do we perceive political contact as stressful and what can affect this appraisal? In another line of work, I hope to explore how perceptions of other peoples’ morality influences intergroup attitudes and emotions.