Current Graduate Students
Tara Broccoli
Advisor: Dr. Diana Sanchez
Year: 6th
Social
Research Interests: I am interested in body image, health behavior, and women's health. Currently, I am exploring the level of connectedness that one experiences in relation to his/her physical body. I am especially interested in the experience of disconnect from one's body with specific concentration on health outcomes.
Tom Cain
Advisor: Dr. Lee Jussim
Year: 5th
Social
Research Interests: I am currently interested in how fear biases a person's perceptions, judgments and behavior. Additionally, I am interested in examining how individuating information affects implicit bias. That is, whether a person who holds implicit bias towards a stigmatized group also holds implicit bias towards a specific member of that group (e.g. bias towards pirates in general vs. bias towards a specific pirate). For example, my master’s thesis examinined how manipulating individuating information (intelligence, rum consumption) affects implicit bias.
George Chavez
Advisor: Dr. Diana Sanchez
Year: 1st
Area: Social
Research Interests: I am broadly interested in racial self-identification and the perception of race. More specifically, I study how multiracial individuals racially identify under different social contexts, and the implications this has for their psychological well-being. Current studies involve using implicit methods to monitor changes in unconscious racial self-identification (e.g. racially identifying differently when under threat). Additionally, I am interested in how individuals of ambiguous racial identity are perceived both by others and their ingroups.
Carrie Coffield
Advisor: Dr. Jeannette Haviland-Jones
Year: 5th
Social/Developmental
Research Interests: I am interested in developmental disabilities and emotion. Specifically, I have spent time investigating the emotionality of children with autism: both their expression of emotion and their perception of emotion. I am also interested in the ways that one's environment may influence his/her behavior. My dissertation research will, therefore, investigate the impact of certain environmental factors (light and odor) of looking at emotion of a child with autism.
Jarret Crawford
Advisor: Dr. Lee Jussim
Year: 5th
Social
Research Interests: Motivated social cognition in a political context. Specifically, predicting the conditions under which ideological biases will emerge in social cognition.
Jason Glushakow
Advisor: Dr. John Aiello
Year: 4th
Social/Industrial-Organizational
Research Interests: My research interests include spatial behavior, interruptions, social facilitation, consumer psychology, and the effect different communication modalities have on interpersonal influence.
Jessica Good
Advisor: Dr. Diana Sanchez
Year: 2nd
Social
Research Interests: I have broad interests in stereotyping and discrimination,
particularly as it relates to gender. Specifically, I am interested in the effectiveness of countering benevolent sexism and other sexist content such as in textbooks. I am also interested in why people enact stereotypical social roles, what motivates this behavior, and the effects of counter-stereotypic behaviors.
Michael Kuang
Advisor: Dr. John Aiello
Year: 1st
Social/Industrial-Organizational
Research Interests: Some of my interests include the impact of technology and how it facilities social interaction, changing technology mediums and its influence on the individual and organizations, and the social aspect of virtual environments.
Meng Li
Advisor: Dr. Gretchen Chapman.
Year: 2nd
Social/Health
Research Interests: I have two main research interests decision making and self-control.
Specifically, I am studying how decisions can be biased, for example, by the description of 100% (100% effective, 100% coverage, etc), or by the "naturalness" of a product. I am also interested in how certain experiences influence people's subsequent self-control behavior, such as the choice between immediate gratification and delayed reward.
Graduate Programs
Social Psychology
Mandy Moreno
Advisor: Dr. Diana Sanchez
Year: 5th
Social
Research Interests: My research interests include close relationships, identity, and technology. Currently I am finishing my dissertation, which seeks to discern the personality traits and relationship styles of online daters. In the future I'd like to examine identity and technology use and adoption, as well as studying people who have "alter egos" that they indulge on a regular basis.
Corinne Moss-Racusin
Advisor: Dr. Laurie Rudman, Dr. Diana Sanchez
Year: 2nd
Social
Research Interests: My primary research interests include stereotyping processes and intergroup conflict, gender roles, and implicit attitudes. More specifically, I am interested in how stereotypes shape behavior processes and self-monitoring, and how they in turn impact politics, the media, and health outcomes. For example, my masters thesis investigates the impact of gender differences in self-advocacy behavior on workplace gender parity.
Heather Nofziger
Advisor: Dr. Lee Jussim
Year: 1st
Social
Research Interests: Though my research interests tend to be somewhat eclectic, including gender/sexual identity development and stereotype processes, my current work focuses on intergroup conflict. My primary interest is in how and why individuals become involved in and supportive of violent group conflicts. Specifically, I am looking to model the processes which contribute to individual participation in genocidal conflicts and to address the potential methods of intervention.
Julie Phelan
Advisor: Dr. Laurie Rudman, Dr. Diana Sanchez
Year: 3rd
Social
Research Interests: I have several current research interests, most of which involve the study of impression formation, stereotyping, and prejudice. For example, my masters thesis explored how negative reactions to counterstereotypical behavior contributes to cultural stereotype maintenance.
L. Alison Phillips
Advisor: Dr. Howard Leventhal, Dr. Gretchen Chapman
Year: 2nd
Social/Health
Research Interests: My research interests involve classifying, studying, and predicting consistent behaviors, especially health-related behaviors important for the management of chronic illness.
Kimberly Robinson
Advisor: Richard Contrada
5th year
My master's thesis examined the interaction of person and environment factors in determining health. Currently, I am interested in the influence of close relationships on adaptation to chronic illness.
Lyra Stein
Advisor: Dr. John Aiello
Year: 2nd
Social/Industrial-Organizational
Research Interests: I am interested in personality predictors of workplace behavior. Currently I am working on a study which investigates the contribution of individual differences to social facilitation and impairment which plays an important role in employee monitoring and job performance.
Sean Stevens
Advisor: Dr. Dave Wilder, Dr. Lee Jussim
Year: 1st
Social
Research Interests: My primary research interests include political psychology, stereotyping processes, and in-group out-group biases. More specifically I am interested in how group and ideological biases can influence our attitudes and behavior towards both in-group and out-group members, particularly in the realm of political behavior.
Aarathi Venkatesan
Advisor: Dr. Richard Contrada
Year: 5th
Social/Health
Research Interests: My name is Aarathi Venkatesan. I am a 5th year graduate student in the social/health interdisciplinary program. My current research interests consider the cognitive and affective processes involved in persuasion. Specifically, I am examining the role of emotion regulation and attention in the processing of fear-arousing health
communications. My past research has focused on the effect of social status threats and dispositional dominance on cardiovascular reactivity.
Jeffrey Vietri
Advisor: Dr. Gretchen Chapman
Year: 4th
Social/Health
Research Interests: My research concerns how emotions shape the way we think, as well as judgment and decision processes, especially as they apply to social and health judgments/decisions. My recent work has explored how emotions affect the use of judgmental heuristics, actor-observer differences in behavioral prediction, and how social factors shape our own vaccination intentions and the public health policies we endorse.