Social Psychology Program
Students
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Stephanie Anderson 7th year student Office: Fraser 549 |
| Research Interests: I work with Glenn Adams. My research focuses primarily on the cultural grounding of personal relationship. I study how particular socio-cultural and historical circumstances influence psychological phenomena, such as the process of attraction. |
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Matt Baldwin
Office: Fraser 549
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Research Interests: I work mostly with Monica Biernat and my research interests fall broadly within the area of social cognition as it relates to sterotyping and prejudice. Specifically, I am interested in the way we process social information and the consequences of such processing in various social situations. Recently, I have been investigating the relationship between social categorization and recognition memory for faces of other racial and social groups. I am also working with Ludwin Molina examining the relationship between categorization and the use of "social others" to establish group identity. |
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Melanie Canterberry 3rd year student Office: Fraser 460 |
| Research Interests: I work with Omri
Gillath, studying close relationships primarily from an attachment
theoretical perspective. Broadly, I am interested in how and why we
(as humans) initiate and maintain romantic relationships. Currently,
I am pursuing research exploring the relationship between adult
attachment style and one's ability to control thoughts and regulate
emotions (when confronted with attachment related stimuli), with a
focus on cognitive strategies and neurological mechanisms. |
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Tara Collins 3rd year student Office: Fraser 550 |
| Research Interests: I work with Omri
Gillath broadly exploring romantic relationships. More specifically,
I am interested in the |
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Owen Cox 4th year student Office phone: 4-9838 |
| Research Interests: I work with Chris Crandall. My research interests are political psychology and the psychology of legitimacy. Specifically, I am interested the perceived legitimacy of leaders. Last year I did my honors thesis over the perceptions of unit relationships between Bush and Cheney and how negative or positive views of one may effect the perception of the other. |
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Tracey
Cronin 4th year student Office phone: 4-9838 |
| Research Interests: I work primarily with Nyla Branscombe. In short, I’m interested in how people cope with and respond to discrimination. For example, my Master’s thesis was based on a test of an extended version of Branscombe’s (1999) rejection-identification model with a longitudinal data set collected at UCLA. I explored whether or not Mexican-American students who experience discrimination on campus use ingroup identification as a psychological buffer to the negative effects of discrimination. I tested whether or not this pattern differs across time and whether or not activism in response to discrimination can serve as a similar protective buffer to the experience of discrimination. Currently, I’m working on research that tests how the construction of meaning of a discrimination event (and subsequent behavioral responses) can be shaped by perceptions of shared experience of that event with ingroup others. |
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Kelly Danaher 5th year student Office phone: 4-9838 |
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Research Interests: My work has primarily been with Monica Biernat, focusing on how stereotypes influence and are used by people. Specifically, I'm interested in how people use stereotypes for personal benefit. I also work with Nyla Branscombe on the effects of organizational discrimination on organizational identification and perceptions of meritocracy. |
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Gokce
Gungor 6th year student Office phone: 4-9835 |
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Research Interests: I work with Monica Biernat and Glenn Adams. My research interests lie in gender stereotyping, discrimination. Recently I have been doing research that mainly look at how various group characteristics (e.g., gender, social class, parental status) effect perceivers' evaluations of and emotions toward the target and how target's own performance expectations, future aspirations are affected by perceivers' evaluations in different contexts. |
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sggungor@ku.edu | Social Program | Culture and Psychology Research Group |
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Lucas Keefer |
| Research Interests: I work primarily with Mark Landau. My research emphasizes the role of object possession and commodification in coping with existential concerns. Specifically I am in the process of exploring the role of objects in fulfilling security needs, the extent to which social factors influence object value, and the relationship between authenticity and object production. My other related research interests include embodiment, heuristic processes in value judgments, the existential role of sexual fetishization, aesthetic judgment, and phenomenological psychology. |
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Tugce Kurtis 3rd year student Office phone: |
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Research Interests: I work primarily with Glenn Adams. My research focuses on the sociocultural and gendered constructions of self and identity (particularly through self and cultural narratives), self-disclosure and self-silencing as well as the implications of these processes for health and social policy. Recently, I began exploring processes of collective remembering and forgetting, different constructions of past traumatic events and their role on collective identity. |
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Sahana Mukherjee
1st year student Office phone: 864-9838 |
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Research Interests: I work primarily with Ludwin Molina and Glenn Adams. My research interests fall broadly within Political and Cultural Psychology. I am in the process of exploring the role of the 'other' in defining one's group identity. That is, by distinguishing who the other group is helps us define our own group. I am also interested in the relation between gender and helping behavior, especially how helping relations are essentially unequal social relations. My other research interests include cultural constructions of identity, construction of a national identity and the study of racism and oppression. |
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Angela
Nierman 4th year student Office phone: 4-4254 |
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Research Interests: I work primarily with
Chris Crandall. My research focuses on prejudice, perceptions of
threat, and reactions to social |
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Nia Phillips 6th year student Office phone: 4-9838 |
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Research Interests:I am currently working with Chris Crandall doing prejudice research. Specifically, I am examining social change (including people's attitudes toward social change) and the role that this plays in the manifestation of prejudice. I am interested both traditional targets of prejudice as well as non-traditional targets, such as groups that support the status quo. I am looking to see if there is a connection between the extent to which a group is a proponent for change and the extent that prejudice is expressed towards that group. |
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Kate Pickett 5th year student Office phone: 4-9838 |
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Research Interests:I work primarily with Glenn Adams. I take a sociocultural approach to racism and oppression that locates the roots of these phenomena within the social world rather than individual minds. Incorporated within this approach my current research interests include racism and oppression absent of differential treatment, perceptions of racism and sexism, and the effects of representations of racism in social psychology courses. |
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kpickett@ku.edu | Social Program | Culture and Psychology Research Group | Personal Website |
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Jackie Ratliff 4th year student Office phone: 4-9824 |
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Research Interests: I work primarily with Dr. Pat Hawley and my research integrates developmental models of aggression and peer relationships with social psychological paradigms. Specifically, I am interested in the role gender stereotypes play in perceptions of overtly and relationally aggressive adults as well as associated peer regard outcomes (i.e., friendship, popularity, leadership). Likewise, I am interested in the measurement of relational aggression. |
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Zach Rothschild 2nd year student Office phone: 4-9836 |
Research Interests: I work primarily with Mark Landau in the domain of existential social psychology. I am generally interested in the why questions of human motivation and how underlying needs for value, meaning, control and certainty drive a wide array of human behavior. I am also interested in how these motivational forces shape construction of the self and the world-at-large including implications for intergroup relations. |
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Phia Salter 5th year student Office phone: 4-1797 |
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Research Interests: I work primarily with Glenn Adams. I am interested in the cultural constructions of memory and identity. My research interests include cultural representations of the historical past (e.g., ‘Black History Month' displays, museums), the psychological consequences of such representations (i.e., group differences in perceptions of racism, identity), and the relationship between collective memory and identity in West African and Diasporic settings. |
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psalter@ku.edu | Social Program | Culture and Psychology Research Group | Personal Website |
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Alex Schoemann 4th year student Office phone: 4-9838 |
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Research Interests: I work with Nyla Branscombe. In general I am interested in how Social Identity Theory and Self-Categorization Theory can be utilized to provide explanations of inter- and intra-group behavior. |
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Amanda K. Sesko 5th year student Office phone: 864-9812 |
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Research Interests: I primarily work with Monica Biernat. My research interests include race and gender prototypes, effects of membership in multiple-subordinate group categories on social judgment, invisibility as a form of discrimination, and evidentiary standards for perceiving racism. |
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Daniel Sullivan 2nd year student Office Phone: 4-9836 |
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Research Interests: I work with Mark Landau on issues within the scope of experimental existential psychology. I am specifically interested in how individuals create meaning and morality, and the implications of these processes for society and, on the individual level, for the moral emotions. For instance: why are we driven to seek the guilty party behind an evil event? What is guilt? Why do some individuals experience guilt and not others? |
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Laura Taylor Brown 7th year student Office phone: 4-9838 |
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Research Interests: I work with Monica Biernat. My research interests are in self-stereotyping and Inter-group relations. I did my Masters on self-stereotyping in response to personal identity threats, specifically under what circumstances individuals will self- stereotype or take on the characteristics associated with a specific salient group membership. I am now researching if participants threatened with negative feedback on an IQ exam and primed with gender increase the amount of self-stereotyping and collective self-esteem. I also examine self-stereotyping behaviorally and through trait measures, specifically, do conformity and backlash matter? The project looks at backlash and no backlash (sanctions or punishments for behavior) in normative and non-normative (conforming to a gender norm or not) situations. I believe that when a participant sees someone in a vignette receive punishment for their behavior (whether it is normative or non-normative) that this will make participants like the person less and make participants not choose that same type of behavior as this person in the future. |



















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