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Social/Personality Psychology

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The program in Social/Personality Psychology is a nationally prominent program of research and graduate education that offers research training and coursework in:

  • Emotion and Emotion Regulation
  • Group Processes & Intergroup Relations
  • Health & Well-Being
  • Organizational Leadership
  • Personality
  • Race & Ethnicity
  • Self & Identity
  • Research Methodology & Quantitative Psychology
  • Social Cognition 
  • Social Neuroscience

The social/personality area has particular and unique strengths in diversity & inequality psychology and health & well-being. Faculty in the area have audio-visual laboratories and observation rooms, and use state-of-the-art assessment methods including Electronically-Activated Recorders (i.e., EAR devices), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), physiological measures, mathematical modeling, experience sampling, life story interviews, among others.

Outside the laboratory, UCR social/personality area faculty have conducted research in Riverside city classrooms, local hospitals and clinics, other community settings, and businesses in California and around the world. Social/personality area faculty also have close ties with the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and UCR’s School of Medicine and Center for Healthy Communities.

Grant Title: A Model of Generalized Ingroup Recognition Advantage

PI: Jimmy Calanchini

Source: National Science Foundation

Summary: The goal of this project is to study the mechanisms and boundary conditions of ingroup recognition, and the qualitative nature of the cognitive processes that underlie it.


Grant Title: An emotion-motivation-obstruction approach to waiting and worry

PI: Kate Sweeny

Source: National Science Foundation

Summary: These 9 studies test the tenets of the newly-proposed Emotion-Motivation-Obstruction model, which aims to explain why sometimes emotions plague our health and well-being and other times come and go without consequence. 


Grant Title: Patience planning in psychology: Construct refinement and building an empirical base for interdisciplinary inquiry

PI: Kate Sweeny

Source: Templeton Foundation

Summary: This project investigates the psychological concept- and measurement-building stages of a broader interdisciplinary collaboration on patience.


Grant Title: The social impact and malleability of neural biases in perceptual deindividuation 

PI: Brent Hughes

Source: National Science Foundation


Grant Title: How can people connect more deeply through self-disclosure? Testing the linguistic, nonverbal, and neural mechanisms of successful communication

PI: Brent Hughes


Grant Title: What if they look like us? Deindividuation of social outgroup members in the absence of between-group visual differences 

PI: Brent Hughes

Source: BSF US-Israel Binational Science Foundation

  • Jimmy Calanchini weighed in on judgment biases for the CBC’s Ideas with Nahlah Ayed
  • Monica Beals – a recent graduate of Kate Sweeny’s lab – has accepted an assistant professor position at Northern Arizona University.
  • Missy Wilson – a recent graduate of Kate Sweeny’s lab –has accepted an assistant professor position at Norco Community College.
  • Annie Regan – a recent graduate of Sonja Lyubormirsky’s lab – has accepted a UX research position at Google.
  • Jacob Elder – a recent graduate of Brent Hughes’ lab – has accepted a Behavioral Scientist position at Vanguard.
  • Yrian Derreumaux – a recent graduate of Brent Hughes’ lab – has accepted a Quantitative UX research position at Google.
  • Kate Sweeny is featured on the Science of Personality Podcast and The Art of Manliness Podcast.
  • Sonja Lyubomirsky is featured in the Netflix film Mission: JOY.
  • Stephen Antonopolis’ research on cross-race friendships was featured on the Character & Context Blog.