Social, Personality and Abnormal
Area Description (St. George)
Researchers in the Social/Personality/Abnormal area share an interest in themes related to both self-regulation and self-identity.
Alison Chasteen's research examines stereotyping and prejudice with respect to age. In particular, she focuses on how people's self-concepts regarding their future aged selves influence age-based prejudice.
Dan Dolderman's research is focused on the relationship between individuals’ self-definition and their pro-environmental behaviours, and on designing community programs that help individuals to adopt more environmentally friendly behaviours.
Jonathan Freedman's research focuses on the link between psychology and the law, with particular emphasis on understanding how juries are affected and the role of race, pretrial publicity, and confessions.
Peter Herman studies eating, with an emphasis on cognitive and situational influences. He is more generally concerned with self-regulation and social influence, especially as they pertain to appetitive behaviors.
Penelope Lockwood is interested in the role of social comparisons in self-regulation. She examines the ways in which comparisons to role models influence achievement and health-related motivation, and the factors that influence affective and behavioural responses to comparisons between partners in romantic relationships.
Geoff Macdonald's research centers on perceptions of and responses to interpersonal rejection. Specific topics include feelings of social pain, perceptions of reward in social interaction, the role of self-esteem in romantic relationships across cultures, reactions to criticism from a romantic partner, fear responses to awareness of mortality, and conformity/nonconformity.
Jordan Peterson studies personality assessment, self-deception, cognitive function, theories of social conflict, motivation, drug and alcohol abuse, aggression and the psychology of religion.
Jason Plaks focuses on the interface between motivation and cognition. One emphasis is on how implicit theories (unstated, yet powerful assumptions about human nature) influence people's affective and motivational reactions to success and failure. A second emphasis is on how implicit theories influence basic person perception and stereotyping processes.
Nicholas Rule studies person perception, focusing particularly on the accuracy of judgments from minimal nonverbal and facial cues. His work generally falls into two streams: (1) predicting outcomes about people based on minimal cues, and (2) social categorization processes in perceptually ambiguous groups. He holds the distinction of Canada Research Chair in Social Perception and Cognition.
Jennifer Tackett conducts research at the intersection of personality, developmental psychopathology, and behavioral genetics. She is interested in personality measurement in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood and its relation to disorders indexing self-regulatory processes such as antisocial behavior and relational aggression.
Romin Tafarodi 's research is concerned with the cultural character of self and identity. His most recent work examines acculturative identity change as it is reflected in narrative structure, especially with regard to the integration of challenging experiences into the life story.
Social/Personality/Abnormal (SPA) website: Visit the SPA website for more information about this area of research, about the area's faculty and graduate students active at all three U of T campuses, and about SPA group activities.
Research at the University of Toronto Scarborough