NYU Psychology PhD Student Research

Student			Affiliations	Research question (one per lab)
Elizabeth Allen			Cognition & Perception	For children and for adults, what counts as a good answer to a why-question?
Rick Andrews			Social	"Research question": "What kind of situations, motivations, or cognitions drive people to become more ideologically liberal? (Jost)  How do personality and political ideology interact amongst members of traditionally disadvantaged groups? (Jost)  What kinds of personality features might predict switching political parties during an election cycle? (Jost)"
Heather Barry			Social	Where do fantasies about the future come from, and what motivational and affective consequences do they have (with Gabriele Oettingen)? What motivates people to engage in behavior that helps their group (with Tom Tyler)? What effect do individual goals have on social support provision in relationships (with Pat Shrout)?
Suzette Caleo			Social	How do gender norms lead to biased perceptions of justice? (with Madeline Heilman and Tom Tyler) How do remote work arrangements affect the stereotyping of coworkers? (with Madeline Heilman)
Shana Cole			Social	What do different affective responses after receiving praise from others tell us about the motivations people have when processing positive social feedback? (Emily Balcetis) After experiencing envy at a friend’s success, to what extent, and at what cost, will people engage in sabotage behaviors? And what are people’s motivations for doing so? What do they hope to accomplish? (Emily Balcetis) Do emotionally reactive individuals literally perceive more negativity in the facial expressions of others? (Emily Balcetis)
Eric DeWitt			Cognition & Perception Developmental	What are the neural mechanisms that underlie decision making and how can we integrate neural, behavioral and economic models of human choice?
Katja Doerschner			Cognition & Perception	What information about the light field does the visual system represent when estimating the color of matte surfaces, and what cues does it use to extract this information from the scene?
Irina Feygina			Social	How do experiences with different cultural and political contexts influence perceptions of procedural justice, the negotiation of multiple social identities, political engagement, and acculturation? (with Tom Tyler) How do immigrants begin to justify the American social system and respond to associated stereotypes? (with John Jost)
Stuart Fuller			Cognition & Perception	How does attention affect stimulus appearance?
Jacqueline Fulvio			Cognition & Perception	How do people fill in the missing portions of objects that are subject to occlusion by camouflage or other objects that vary in their degree of transparency/opacity?
Anna Gassman-Pines			Community Quantitative Developmental	What is the relationship between mothers' working conditions, parenting, and children's development in low-income families?
Holly Gerhard			Cognition & Perception	How does the visual system accomplish color constancy?
Simone Gill-Alvarez			Cognition & Perception Developmental	How do children and adults develop behavioral flexibility - the ability to adapt their movements to changes in local conditions?
Anna Marie Giordano			Cognition & Perception	How does attention affect the temporal aspect of visual information processing?
May Ling Halim			Social	Why do a good number of girls become tomboys in middle childhood, while the same change is not true for boys? (with Diane Ruble) Does high gender identification in early childhood persist over time? How does intense gender identification in early childhood affect adjustment years later? (with Diane Ruble) How does ethnic identity moderate the relation between perceived discrimination and health? (with David Amodio)
Erin Hennes			Social	What cognitive and motivational factors lead us to favor the status quo? (with John Jost).  Is the tendency to self-handicap a stable trait, and how might it relate to self-determination? (with Patrick Shrout)
Yun-Xian Ho			Cognition & Perception	How do we perceive three-dimensional texture, roughness?
Aaron Hoffman			Cognition & Perception	How do people discover useful information?
Sylviane Houssais			Social	How can people turn fantasies about their future (in academic, work, personal and social domains) into reality? How can people set achievable goals and strive for them successfully? What makes people more or less committed to their goals? (with Gabriele Oettingen and Peter Gollwitzer)
Akiko Ikkai			Cognition & Perception	How do our brains plan, remember, execute, and evaluate motor actions?
Shaziela Ishak			Cognition & Perception Developmental	How do infants learn to make adaptive motor decisions in risky situations?
Amy Joh			Cognition & Perception Developmental	How do infants, children, and adults learn to guide their actions prospectively?
Shin Woo Kim			Cognition & Perception	What is the role of causal reasoning in categorization and induction?
Daniel Kirk			Social	What are the effects of self-regulation on creative problem-solving? (with Peter Carnevale & Peter Gollwitzer) What role does justice play in social dilemmas? (with Tom Tyler)
Laura Kressel			Social	How are our decisions influenced by temporal perspective?
Margarita Krochik			Social	What basic processes of motivated cognition are involved in the adoption of an ideology, and how do such individual tendencies interact with interpersonal contexts to shape ideological outcomes? What are the interpersonal, intergroup, and societal consequences of ideological conflict (and consensus)? (with John Jost) Do perceptions of conflict or bias in the decision-making processes employed in various government bodies (e.g. Congress, the Supreme Court) shape how effective, important, and legitimate the public perceives these bodies to be? (with Tom Tyler) What role does psychological distance play in how political ideology is mentally represented, structured, and translated into decisions and behavior in political and non-political contexts? (with Yaacov Trope)
Amy Krosch			Social	Why do some people act in a just manner, even when their automatic tendencies or immediate goals conflict with their beliefs and ideals? (with Tom Tyler and David Amodio)
Sean Lane			Social	How do intimate couples come to co-regulate their moods over time, and what determines which partner has more influence in these coupled regulatory systems? (with Pat Shrout) How does being distant from our significant others, in time, space, or social status, affect our evaluations of them? (with Yaacov Trope)
Janet Lee			Social	What are the social consequences when we project our goals onto others nonconsciously? (with Gabriele Oettingen and Peter Gollwitzer)
Sara Levens			Cognition & Perception	How does emotion interact with the executive process of inhibition in working memory, what are the neural underpinnings of this interaction, and what does this interaction reveal about emotion processing, goal-oriented behavior, and inhibitory function?
Samuel Ling			Cognition & Perception	How does attention affect how we see?
Leah Lurye			Social Developmental	How does gender development relate to issues of identity, social judgments of others, and adjustment?
Sam Maglio			Social	How do emotional experiences color the goals people set and the strategies they devise to attain those goals? (with Peter Gollwitzer & Gabriele Oettingen) Do different strategies of making decisions lead to differences in how people act on them and feel about them afterward? (with Peter Gollwitzer) Can the different dimensions of psychological distance be conceptualized and combined as an interchangeable sort of common currency? (with Yaacov Trope)
Anesu Mandisodza			Social	How do people perceive, interpret and respond to threatening and/or changing social systems?
Andrea Martin			Cognition & Perception	What is the role of memory and attention in human sentence processing?
Saaid Mendoza			Social	How can explicit goal strategies help reduce implicit intergroup biases?
Goran Milovanovic			Cognition & Perception	How does background knowledge interact with empirical data in concept learning and how do we construct features of concepts in the light of prior knowledge?
Barbara Montagna			Cognition & Perception	How does covert attention affect spatial and temporal aspects of vision, such as spatial resolution and perceived flicker rate?
Leila Montaser Kouhsari			Cognition & Perception	Where in the visual pathway do we process illusory contours?
Andreas Olsson			Cognition & Perception	What are the neural and cognitive processes involved in learning emotionally significant information from, and about, others?
Ilke Oztekin			Cognition & Perception	How do we retrieve information from working memory?
Franco Pestilli			Cognition & Perception	How does spatial covert attention affect contrast sensitivity at attended and unattended locations?
Gaëlle Pierre			Social	How can we increase engagement and cooperation in groups and between groups? (with Peter Carnevale, Tom Tyler, Elke Weber) Why are women penalized for success in male domains? (with Madeline Heilman)
Polina Potanina			Social	How do the automatic components of racial and gender bias interact with consciously-held beliefs about such biases? (with David Amodio) How do such biases help perpetuate the hierarchical structure of society? (with John Jost)
Polina Potanina			Social	How do the automatic components of racial and gender bias interact with consciously-held beliefs about such biases? (with David Amodio) How do such biases help perpetuate the hierarchical structure of society? (with John Jost)
Hugh Rabagliati			Cognition & Perception Developmental	What mechanisms do infants use to discover and then acquire language?
Maria Ramos			Community Developmental	What is the relationship between maternal work goals, welfare-to-work program assignment, and children’s academic and behavioral outcomes?
Kyle Ratner			Social	How quickly do we notice group differences? How does anxiety influence intergroup behavior? How do we reduce prejudice and stereotypes? (with David Amodio) How do we generalize from one person to a different person of the same group? (with Yaacov Trope & Daphna Shohamy)
SoYon Rim			Social	Are spontaneous trait inferences controllable once they have been formed? (with Jim Uleman) How does psychological distance from others influence our implicit impressions of them? (with Jim Uleman and Yaacov Trope)
Ann Rivera			Community Developmental	What social processes and forms of competence promote positive development among adolescents growing up in low-income neighborhoods? (with Ed Seidman and Diane Hughes) How do government and community-based programs affect children and adolescents in low-income families? (with Hirokazu Yoshikawa)
Sarah Shuwairi Carton			Cognition & Perception Developmental	How do coherent object representations develop in early infancy? (with Scott Johnson) What are the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying our perception of continuous and coherent 3D objects under conditions of occlusion? (with Scott Johnson, Clay Curtis, and Nava Rubin)
Peter Sokol-Hessner			Cognition & Perception	What is the neural basis of a decision?
Kasey Soska			Cognition & Perception Developmental	How does the perception of 3D objects develop over the first year of life? (with Scott Johnson) How does infant manual exploration develop in various postures? (with Karen Adolph)
Bernhard Staresina			Cognition & Perception	What are the neurocognitive mechanisms of memory encoding and retrieval?
Hadley Tassinari			Cognition & Perception	Can human subjects optimally combine prior information with current evidence during a rapid motor task?
Jennifer Thorpe			Social	Can significant others help one to know how to help others in ways that are desired (versus undesired) by them? (Susan Andersen)
Jojanneke van der Toorn			Social	How, why, and when do people either resist, provide support for, or directly engage in social change? (with John Jost) What is the effect of dependence on perceived legitimacy of authority? (with John Jost and Tom Tyler) Are different types of systems justified in different ways and/or to a different extent? (with John Jost) How do system justification tendencies play out in the mental state inferences we draw from people’s behavior? (with John Jost and David Amodio)
Dawn Witherspoon			Community Quantitative Developmental	How are positive neighborhood processes and structural characteristics related to adolescent development among ethnically diverse groups?
Shih-Wei Wu			Cognition & Perception	How do humans plan movements in environments where explicit costs and benefits are specified?
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