Research

Humans are inherently social species, and the ability to successfully navigate social environments is critical for our well-being. There is growing evidence linking basic features of social cognition, such as social attention, social inference, and emotion regulation to variance in social functioning and well-being across people. It is essential to understand what, why, and how people differ regarding these social affective behaviors, and what are the real-world impact of these variations. Meanwhile, I’m also interested in how social cognitive-affective processes translate from in-lab contexts to real-world settings.

My research aims to:
(1) elucidate the behavioral and neurocomputational mechanism of individual variation of social cognition in both lab and real-world contexts using a multidisciplinary method.
(2) determine the beneficial and detrimental features of such individual differences to well-being.
(3) mapping social affective cognition in complex real-world settings.

Below are the main projects I’m currently working on:

Ongoing cognition, emotion regulation variability, and well-being

Collaborators: Dr. Carmen Morawetz, Dr. Jonny Smallwood