Welcome!

Hello! I’m Ruien Wang (王睿恩 in Chinese), currently a Ph.D student in psychology working with Prof. Anita Tusche in Queen’s Neuroeconomics Lab at Department of Psychology, Queen’s University, Ontario, Canada.

My research programs focus on understanding the individual differences in social cognitive and affective behaviors (i.e., mentalizing, emotion regulation) in both lab and real-world contexts, and how these individual differences influence social functioning (i.e., loneliness, social network) and well-being. To this end, I adopt a multidisciplinary approach combining behavioral paradigms, experience sampling, eye-tracking, neuroimaging, and computational modeling. Here are some key questions that I study:

• Why do some people struggle with regulating emotion effectively and flexibly?
• Why do some people struggle with building and maintaining social connections?
• What neurocognitive processes explain people’s ability to understand others (e.g., mentalizing), and how do these processes shape daily social interactions and social functioning?
• Can we predict people’s social cognitive and affective behaviors using spontaneous ongoing thoughts?

For further details, please see the Research Section.

During my undergraduate study at the University of Macau, I worked with Prof. Haiyan Wu in Affective Neuroscience & Decision-Making lab and did some work on oxytocin & face perception, motivated dishonesty, as well as individual difference of neurophysiological representations of emotional experiences (5-min intro to this work).