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Elizabeth Page-Gould
University of Toronto Scarborough Professional Website: http://page-gould.com Lab Website: http://embodiedsocialcognition.com What does your research focus on? Generally, I research how social interactions with other people — both friends and strangers — affect our understanding of the social world. More specifically, I focus on how friendship with people from different social groups (“cross-group friendship”) impacts intergroup processes. This is a relatively old question within the field of intergroup relations, but I have been examining it anew by applying or developing experimental paradigms that can test the causal role of diverse friendships on intergroup experience.
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Christin M. Ogle
Duke University What does your research focus on? The focus of my research is on developmental factors that influence memory for traumatic life events and trauma-related psychopathology. What drew you to this line of research and why is it exciting to you? My professional interest in memory developed during my second year at Reed College while working under the mentorship of Dr. Daniel Reisberg. Dr. Reisberg and I worked on a project in collaboration with the Portland police bureau that was designed to examine local policy concerning procedures used to obtain eyewitness identifications.
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Kristen Lindquist
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill www.unc.edu/~kal29 What does your research focus on? My research focuses on understanding the nature of human emotion. I’m broadly interested in understanding what emotions are, how they are created by the brain, and how they emerge during social behavior. My ongoing lines of research are united by the hypothesis that emotions are constructed of more fundamental psychological processes that are general to all mental states. In this view, emotions arise from the combination of basic positive and negative feelings, concept knowledge, and attention.
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Edward Lemay
University of New Hampshire http://lemay.socialpsychology.org What does your research focus on? I have a number of research interests related to interpersonal relationships. One line of research examines motivated cognition within the context of relationships, especially how motivation may bias perceptions of partners’ care, commitment, and regard. In a related line of research, I am examining the motivation to be valued by partners and its impact on interpersonal behavior. Finally, in a third line of research, I am examining how people manage relationships with chronically insecure and emotionally unstable relationship partners.
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Sangeet Khemlani
Navy Center for Applied Research in Artificial Intelligence, Naval Research Lab http://mentalmodels.princeton.edu/skhemlani http://www.nrl.navy.mil/aic/iss What does your research focus on? My research examines the mental representations and cognitive processes underlying deductive reasoning, creative thinking, and abductive explanations. A major challenge is to explain why people are predictably poor on some tasks, e.g., making certain deductions or estimating probabilities, but extraordinarily skilled at others, e.g., devising explanations. My collaborators and I think that the answer to this question is that mental simulations are the basis of high-level thinking.
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Philipp Kanske
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences www.kanske.de www.cbs.mpg.de/staff/kanske-291 What does your research focus on? My research interests evolve around the central topic of “emotion”. Specifically, my work tries to elucidate how emotions influence attention and cognitive control? How, in turn, emotions are modulated through cognitive processes? And what role the capacity to modulate emotions plays in understanding others? I study these questions in the context of psychopathology, using neuroscience tools to better understand the neural bases of alterations in depression, bipolar disorder, and other mental disorders.
