The SP Colloquium series started off the new year with a data blitz by our very own, Drs. Jennifer Steele, Amy Muise, Kerry Kawakami, Raymond Mar, and Joey Cheng. Each faculty member presented a sampler of the exciting research being conducted in their labs, often highlighting work conducted by their students.
Jennifer Steele started off the data blitz by talking about work on the underrepresentation of women in STEM. She shared with us an amazing collaboration where her team will be involved in designing a high school course about the history of Black people in Canada, where she also plans to collect data in the classroom.
Amy Muise summarized key takeaways from the findings in her lab about promoting great relationship satisfaction: sensitivity to your partner’s needs, and novelty, are two ways to increase satisfaction in the moment and in the long-term.
Kerry Kawakami showcased her lab’s research, which is currently on who confronts racism and sexism, how confronters are perceived, and how repeated exposure to different race faces can improve recognition of different race faces. She also highlighted the diverse methodologies used in her work, such as reverse correlations and eye-tracking.
Raymond Mar reported on some new work with collaborators in Germany about using large-scale, school-administered surveys to investigate the link between leisure reading in various fiction genres and social adjustment. He also mentioned work conducted with his student about how siblings shape adult theory of mind.
Joey finished off our round of data blitz by introducing new lines of research, where she is interested in why men tend to engage in competition to a greater extent than women and why women are underconfident in their abilities. She is also interested in egalitarianism.