Affective Science Graduate Student Fellowship

Pia's research explores the dynamic role of serotonin in regulating innate social behaviors. Her work leverages a combination of systems neuroscience and computational techniques to investigate how specific serotonergic projections act as an inhibitory brake on aggression, aiming to uncover novel therapeutic interventions for the treatment of hyperaggression.

Andrea is a Physics PhD student working within the neurobiology department. Her current research examines the neuronal mechanisms behind how our internal models of the world and of others guide our social decision-making. Her work also explores how primates can have more complex motivations beyond simple reward maximization, including how they can find intrinsic motivation in cooperation despite the potential personal costs.

Julia's research examines how people understand and respond to racial inequality across domains, from policing to the financial sector. Through surveys and experiments, she integrates social psychological and affective methods to investigate the factors underlying majority group members’ perceptions of racial inequality and efforts to reduce it. 

Yuka's research spans linguistics, cognitive science, and speech technology, with a focus on how emotion is conveyed and perceived through speech across languages and listeners. Her work investigates universality in emotional speech recognition by comparing human and speech language model performance, as well as emotional speech production through psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and computational lenses.

Victor Wu is a JD-PhD student in Political Science whose research studies how messenger identity, framing, and cognitive biases shape public support for climate policy. His work bridges climate psychology and environmental law to inform both communication strategies and regulatory approaches to environmental governance.

Flora Jiaxuan Xu is a Ph.D. candidate in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources (E-IPER), minor in Psychology. Her research focuses on Nature Identity: the proposition that nature functions as a core component of the self-concept, shaping how individuals perceive themselves and engage with the broader social and ecological environment. She is currently investigating how leveraging nature as both a psychological resource and a design medium can cultivate deeper human-nature relationships in urban environments, with downstream benefits for individual wellbeing and planetary sustainability.

Katherin Yu is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, studying turn-of-the-century Einfühlung psychologies of aesthetics in connection with twentieth-century typographical poetics. Her dissertation makes a case for attending to the psychology of eye movement itself within the aesthetic experience of typographical poems, positioning eye movement alongside broader kinesthetic processes.