Lab Members
— Principal Investigator —
Photographer: Gary Beechey
— Graduate Students —
Kaiwen (Kev) Zhou
✉ kaiwenz@yorku.ca
“Are you one of ours?” People make these implicit decisions upon encountering others automatically everyday. These decisions lead to significant differences in how we treat others - attention, attitude, behaviours. In my research, I study the factors that influence these decisions. My current project dissects the mechanism of Own-Race Bias, the superior recognition of racial in-group members over out-group members, through analyzing behavioural and eye-tracking data on cross-race face processing. I am also interested in mapping the effect of contextual factors on impression formation on neural regions, particularly in the regions of mPFC and ACC. On leisure, I enjoy reading papers from other realms of social science, folklores, and Jungian literatures.
Courtney Chan
✉ chanco@yorku.ca
Emily Bissada
✉ ebissada@yorku.ca
— Postdoctoral Fellows —
Kunalan Manokara
✉ manokara@yorku.ca
— Affiliated Members —
Meghan George
✉ meghanlgeorge@gmail.com
Ronda Lo
My research primarily focuses on cultural variation in social cognitive processes. I also take a special interest in how the cultural experience of being a racial minority can shape downstream intergroup processes, intergroup relations, and broader acculturative processes. My emerging work looks at how perceived race and cultural variation shape social attention patterns via gaze-cueing paradigms.
Francine Karmali
✉ francine.karmali@utoronto.ca
I am currently a postdoctoral fellow in the SPRQL lab at the University of Toronto, also working with the Engendering Success in STEM research consortium and studying intergroup processes and their consequences. By using a multi-method approach, I investigate the processes by which social categorization can form and maintain social biases and inequalities. That is, I examine the ways that perceiving group categories (e.g., race, gender) impact how we think, feel, and behave towards others, as well as contextual (i.e., situational difference) and person factors (i.e., individual differences) that moderate these processes. For example, some of my most recent work demonstrates that race can impact the inferences that we draw from other people's nonverbal behavior. To accomplish my work, I draw on psychological theories and methods from many sub-fields beyond social psychology, including psychophysiology, cognitive, developmental, personality, and industrial-organizational psychology.
