JOHN A. BARGH is Professor of Psychology at Yale University. Undergraduate degree from University of Illinois, 1977; Ph.D. in Social Psychology, University of Michigan, 1981 (advisor: Robert B. Zajonc). From 1981 to 2003, Bargh was on faculty of New York University. His research focuses on automatic or unconscious social information processes, as involved in a variety of phenomena, including motivation and goal pursuit, evaluation and liking, and social behavior. Vita (updated September 2009).

HYUNJIN SONG is a Postdoctoral Associate interested in the interplay between feeling and thinking. Her research has mainly focused on how the feeling of fluency and affect-laden metaphor influences judgments. She is also interested in feelings associated with food choice behaviors and health care decisions. She received her Ph.D. working with Norbert Schwarz at University of Michigan.

KAY SCHWADER is a third year graduate student in the social psychology PhD program. She received her B.A. from Harvard University. Her current research investigates the relationship between behavior and beliefs about free will and determinism. She also studies the development of unconscious processes in goal completion and memory. Her other research interests include consciousness, hypnosis, and priming as it relates to health behaviors.

SARAH HAILEY is a fourth year student in the social psychology PhD program. Her research examines how low-level sensory experience can influence high-level cognitive processes. In particular she focuses on the effects of perceiving spatial distance on feeling emotional distance. She is also interested in whether young children might show these effects.

LILLIA CHERKASSKIY is a fourth year graduate student in the social/personality psychology PhD program. She received her B.A. from Stanford University. Her research focuses on the relationships between emotions and goals. She investigates this relationship using implicit and explicit measures.

REBECCA DYER is a third year student in the social psychology PhD program. She received her B.A. from Haverford College. Her research interests include social cognition, person perception, and deception.

ERICA BOOTHBY is a first year graduate student in the social psychology PhD program. She is especially interested in the way people validate their perceptions of reality using social confirmation. Her other research interests include naive realism, mentalization, and emotion experience.

ORIANA ARAGÓN's current research with Dr. Margaret S. Clark and John Bargh focuses on how competing motivations may pull attention away from one's partner, and how that might influence interpersonal interactions. We have found robust evidence that some motivations reduce the influence of information which is typically perceived automatically. Since much of what transpires during social interactions is transmitted through non-deliberative channels, such as the automatic reading of facial expressions and body language, we expect that a reduced influence of such information has monumental social consequences.

In a second line of research with both Dr. Margaret Clark and Dr. John Bargh, we investigate behavioral manifestations of what appears to be a non-conscious emotion regulation mechanism. It has long been thought in psychology that we have mechanisms such as cognitive dissonance reduction, self-deception, self-justification, and positive illusions (just to name a few) that work best outside of our conscious awareness to shield us from feeling bad. Gilbert (1998) proposed that these mechanisms are an automatic “psychological immune system that serves to protect the individual from an overdose of gloom.” We believe that we have discovered yet another phenomenon that arises out of this protective immune system. Oriana's website.

JOSH BAKER is a fourth year undergraduate in the psychology B.S. program. Primarily interested in social cognition and ingenuity, Josh is currently working as a research assistant to both Rebecca Dyer and Sarah Hailey.

MARGARET BROWN is a senior Psychology major conducting her empirical thesis research in the ACME lab. Margaret is interested in the mechanisms underlying achievement priming and is exploring whether “conscious priming” or “self-priming” is possible in this domain and others. Margaret is also interested in the ways in which theories of social psychology can be applied to business and marketing practices.

HANNAH MENDLOWITZ Hannah Mendlowitz is a senior Psychology major working in the ACME lab with Sarah Hailey. Hannah's research this semester is primarily concerned with how our judgments of blame, forgiveness, and intentionality are affected by temporal distance and social factors.

JORDANA CONFINO is a senior Psychology major conducting empirical research for her thesis in the ACME lab. Jordana is interested in the ability of incidental experiences of physical warmth or cold to induce analogous feelings of interpersonal warmth or coldness, and the effects of this embodiment on social perception, judgment, and behavior. Jordana is also interested in appraisal-tendency theory and the influence of specific emotional states on threat perception and precautionary behavior.