Carnegie Mellon University

Psychology Events

 For more information on upcoming colloquia, email ksebwe@andrew.cmu.edu or call 412-268-3151.


Colloquia

March 21, 2022

Oriel FeldmanHall, PhD, Alfred Manning Endowed Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology, Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences, Brown University

Talk Title: “Navigating Our Uncertain Social Worlds”
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Abstract: Interacting with others is one of the most inherently uncertain acts we embark on. There are a multitude of unknowns, including how to express ourselves, who to confide in, or whether to engage in risky behavior with our peers. All this uncertainty makes successfully navigating the social world a tremendous challenge. Combining behavioral and neuroscientific methods, we explore the social and emotional factors that shape and ultimately guide how humans learn to make adaptive decisions amongst this great uncertainty. In particular, we borrow models from the animal learning literature, and methods from computational neuroscience and machine learning, to examine how humans experience, process, and resolve this uncertainty to make more adaptive decisions.

February 28, 2022

Meghan Meyer, Ph.D., Assistant Professor
Dept of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College

Talk Title: “How the Brain Makes Sense of the Social World”
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Abstract: Humans are a highly social species. As children, we depend on caretakers for support. As adolescents, we navigate intricate social hierarchies. As adults, we cooperate in complex work environments. To thrive in this social world, all of us need to anticipate people’s reactions and learn about our social networks. My program of research integrates social psychology and cognitive neuroscience to understand what drives our inherent tendency, ability, and need to think about the social world around us. I aim to answer questions such as: How do we juggle multiple social cognitive demands on the fly? How do we learn and consolidate information about the people and groups with whom we interact? And how do we represent the complex social networks we navigate day-to-day? In this talk, I will demonstrate how the brain’s default network—an interconnected set of cortical regions—may be designed to help us navigate and learn from our complex social world. In fact, the default network may be so integral to human social behavior that when our social connection goes awry, we see traces of our loneliness in this brain network.

January 31, 2022

Sylvia Perry, PhD., Associate Professor
Departments of Psychology and Medical Social Sciences, Faculty Fellow, Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University

Talk Title: "The implications of recognizing and discussing racial bias”
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Abstract: With the current talk I will discuss my program of research on racial bias awareness—an individual difference measure meant to assess the extent to which White individuals are aware of and concerned about their own racially biased tendencies toward Black individuals. Specifically, across a series of studies, I will discuss (1) how individual differences in racial bias awareness relate to Whites individuals’ reactions to evidence of personal and others’ racial biases, and (2) how bias awareness relates to individuals’ willingness to discuss race and racism with others. Finally, I will discuss newer work on how bias awareness is associated with White parents’ racial socialization practices and how these practices, and the cues that parents convey during them, might influence White children’s intergroup attitudes.