Principal Investigator:
Jennifer Stellar is an assistant professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD in Social-Personality Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley and her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Email: jennifer.stellar@utoronto.ca
Social Personality Research Group Website
Post-doctoral Students
Fred Duong received his PhD at Northeastern University with David DeSteno and Judith Hall. His work centers on moral emotions, decision-making, and behavior. In one line of work, he investigates how emotions influence prosociality and has found, for example, that gratitude increases honest behavior, third-party punishment, and the impartial beneficence dimension of utilitarianism. In another line of work, he researches the lay conceptions of empathy, finding meaningful individual and social group variation, and is currently investigating correlates and downstream consequences.
Graduate Students
HEAL is looking for new graduate students to start in the 2023-2024 academic year. If you are interested in earning your PhD in Psychology at the University of Toronto, click here for more information and the application.
Primary Students
Yachen Li is a Ph.D student in Social/ Personality Psychology. She is interested in how emotions interact with rational cognitive processes. More specifically, her interests focus on self-transcendent emotions (i.e. awe, elevation) – their physiological correlates, and their effect on social cognition and decision-making. In a related line a research, she is interested in how people update their judgment of other people’s moral characters in light of mixed positive and negative moral information.
Jaweria Qaiser is a Ph.D student in Social/Personality Psychology. Her primary research interests focus on what compels individuals to cooperate and coordinate at the dyadic and group levels, factors influencing such coordination, and how such coordination, or lack thereof, influences wellbeing. She is especially interested in the role of prosocial emotions and its physiological underpinnings. Her past work has investigated physiological sharing at the dyadic level during compassionate contexts.
Affiliated Students
Hyuna Cho is a Ph.D student in Social/Personality Psychology. Their primary research interests focus on how memories and beliefs influence decision-making. One line of work investigates whether feeling moral outrage is inherently valuable for individuals, and whether it may differ from the expression of moral behaviours such as third-party punishment.
Arasteh Gatchpazian is a Ph.D student in Social/Personality Psychology. Her primary research interests focus on the lay theories people form and maintain about emotions. More specifically, she is interested in the role of emotion beliefs in shaping the decision-making process. Arasteh is currently investigating how experiencing simultaneous emotions (e.g., compassion and anger) can modify the experience of one another and subsequently influence behaviour.
Alumni
- Nathan Leonhardt, 2022, Assistant Professor at Brigham Young University
- Rachel Forbes, 2022, Senior Data Scientist, Shopify
Undergraduate Students
HEAL is currently full, but please check back in January to see if new research assistant positions are available for the winter term.
Lab Manager
Meyha Chhatwal
Research Assistants
Jyoti Biswas
Lucia Di Censo
Rana El-Kadri
Leigh-Ann Grant
Razel Hendra
Alvina Lai
Dalal Mahir
Monserrath Gonzalez Munoz
Sophia Narciso
Abirami Suthan
Ryan Ugovsek
Laboratory Activities
Holiday Party 2022
Collecting Data at Chelsea Handler and Michelle Obama events (in December!!)
Jaweria presenting her work at the UTM 3-minute Thesis Competition
Health, Emotions, & Altruism Laboratory 