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Department of Psychology

Social Psychology Program: Students


Susanne Bruckmüller

Worked with Nyla Branscombe, Glenn Adams, Andrea Abele (University of Erlangen- Nuremberg, Germany). Broadly interested in gender stereotypes, the gender-related self-concept and the self in general. Current studies include research on the glass cliff (Ryan & Haslam, 2005), which refers to the effect that women are more likely to be selected for leadership positions that are associated with difficulties and a high risk to fail. She’s exploring different processes that might cause this phenomenon with a special focus given to the role of stereotypes about male and female leadership. Other projects concern: the grounding of self-experience in material aspects of a given environment, namely abundance vs. scarcity of resources; the role of gender-related aspects of the self-concept (i.e. masculinity & femininity) for the use of various coping-strategies.

New contact address:  sebruckm@phil.uni-erlangen.de


Vanessa Edkins

Worked with Lawrence Wrightsman and Glenn Adams. Her main interest is psychology and its intersection with the law. Research in this area has focused juror decision-making, juror attitudes, and the legal defense of entrapment. Recently she constructed a scale measuring general attitudes toward the legal system addressing all levels - from attitudes toward police and lawyers to attitudes toward crime policies and sentencing - using a crime control/due process perspective. Secondary interests include definitions of racism.  Her goal is to address whether teaching the concept of racism as something stemming from the individual versus something institutionalized affects what students define as examples of racism or racist behavior.

New contact address:  vedkins@fit.edu


April Horstman Reser

Her research interests lie in the areas of prejudice, stigma, the status quo and Terror Management Theory. She worked with Chris Crandall. With respect to prejudice, she is interested in how people construct and maintain beliefs in themselves as non-prejudiced individuals. Thus far, she has discovered that people believe they are unprejudiced by constructing social comparisons to highly-bigoted others that enable them, by comparison, to decide they are not prejudiced. Her work with regard to stigma focuses on how targets of prejudice come to be stigmatized. In the status quo and terror management areas, she examined how reminders of mortality salience affect people’s reactions to the status quo. When people are threatened with reminders of their own death, they show an exaggerated preference for the status quo. She is also interested in the areas of social justice, retribution and in how one’s political ideology changes one’s perspective on current events.

New contact address:  A.Horstman.Reser@MCLA.edu


Emre Selcuk

Worked with Omri Gillath. Interested in adult attachment theory. He was a Fulbright visiting graduate student from Middle East Technical University, Turkey, where he investigated how self-reported adult attachment was related to parental caregiving behaviors extensively observed in natural home settings. At KU, he worked on two research projects. In one of the research projects, we were trying to understand how adult attachment relates to the way people manage their social networks. In another project, we examined the relationship between adult attachment and thought suppression.

New contact address: emreselcuk81@yahoo.com


Ruth Warner

Worked with Nyla Branscombe and Chris Crandall. Her research interests include the meaning of history, perceived obligations of victims, and justifications for prejudice.

New contact address: ruthhelenwarner@gmail.com