-
Jamil Zaki
Stanford University ssnl.stanford.edu What does your research focus on? I study the cognitive and neural bases of social cognition and behavior, but that’s not very specific! For the past several years, my research focused on empathy and social cognition: how we make sense of and respond to other minds. In graduate school, I examined what’s known as “empathic accuracy” — one individual’s ability to insightfully assess another individual’s emotional states over time.
-
Tessa West
New York University http://psych.nyu.edu/westlab What does your research focus on? My research primarily examines the dynamics that unfold during dyadic interactions, with a particular focus on the intergroup (e.g., cross-race) context. I study how individuals come to make sense of their partners’ behaviors, whether the inferences they make based on these behaviors are accurate, and how psychologists can shape such inferences to improve the quality of intergroup relationships. I also study basic person perception processes, and my theoretical work focuses on developing a unified approach to defining and studying accuracy in interpersonal perception.
-
A. Janet Tomiyama
University of California, Los Angeles www.dishlab.org What does your research focus on? Eating is the thread that ties all of my research together. I study the way we eat (whether that’s overeating in response to things like stress, or not eating, meaning fasting and dieting) and how that makes us healthy or unhealthy. As a health psychologist, I tend to examine biological outcome variables like the stress hormone cortisol, or telomeres, a biomarker of aging represented by the length of the caps that protect chromosomes.
-
Kate Sweeny
University of California, Riverside http://faculty.ucr.edu/~ksweeny What does your research focus on? I have two primary lines of research, both of which address the question of how people manage difficult life events. My first line of research examines the understudied experience of awaiting uncertain news. People frequently face difficult waiting periods when they anticipate news regarding their own or their loved ones’ health, professional prospects, and academic outcomes, and my research reveals how people cope with this type of uncertainty and seeks to identify successful strategies for navigating painful waiting periods.
-
Peggy L. St. Jacques
Harvard University www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~pstjacques What does your research focus on? My research examines the cognitive and neural mechanisms that support autobiographical memory; how memory is affected by age and emotion, and how memory retrieval influences how memories are subsequently retrieved. What drew you to this line of research and why is it exciting to you? I was drawn to research on autobiographical memory because I love a good story, and what better to study than the stories of our lives. What continues to excite me about research on autobiographical memory are its many puzzles: How do daily moments become part of our autobiography?
-
Bob Spunt
California Institute of Technology www.its.caltech.edu/~spunt/ What does your research focus on? My research seeks to understand the neurocognitive processes that allow humans to perceive and explain human behaviors. My theoretical approach is primarily drawn from attribution theories from social psychology, while my methodological approach is primarily drawn from the social and cognitive neurosciences, in particular, the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging. So far, my work has been concerned with characterizing the neural systems that enable the identification and causal explanation of goal-directed actions and expressions of emotion.
