2025 Bob Levenson Research Award Winners
Doris Dai
Postdoctoral Scholar, UC Berkeley Psychology
Toward Meaningful Celebration: Comparing Heritage Months’ Implementations and Implications
Heritage Months aim to celebrate marginalized groups and promote inclusion, but not all receive
equal attention. Our initial study in December 2024 found that half of the respondents were
unaware of Native American Heritage Month in November, and over two-thirds had not seen any
Native representation in November. This project will survey U.S. adults and analyze online
engagement to identify overlooked Heritage Months and types of representation (e.g., media
campaigns, cultural events, or educational programs) that best foster positive intergroup
attitudes. The findings will guide efforts to create more impactful representations that fulfill the
goals of Heritage Month.
Lindsey Deringer and Jefferson Ortega
Graduate students, UC Berkeley Psychology
Variations in the use of facial and contextual information in emotion perception across perceiver and target identities
Humans experience and perceive emotions in their everyday lives in complex, context-rich, and dynamic environments. Thus, in order to truly understand how humans process emotions, we must understand how they use both facial expressions and contextual information to inform their judgments of others' emotions. We aim to answer whether the relative use of contextual and facial information when perceiving the emotion of others differs when the target character is a member of the perceiver's ingroup versus outgroup based on gender differences, as well as if the perceiver’s relative use of information is influenced by gender stereotypes around emotion expressivity.
Sarah Ryan
Graduate student, UC Berkeley Psychology
The Role of Group Identification and Prejudice in Behavior Judgements
A punishment shouldn't be determined by what type of people you think are most likely to break the rule! Our initial study found that when people believed a group they disliked was more likely than their own group to do a bad behavior like cutting in line, they supported punishing that behavior more than if they thought their group did it more, or if the groups cut in line the same amount. We will continue to follow up on this work, investigating if this judgement and punishment based on who is doing it extends to even non-harmful behaviors.
Yi-Hsin Su
Graduate student, UC Berkeley Psychology
Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Decision Delegation in the Age of A.I.
Özge Uğurlu
Postdoctoral Scholar, UC Berkeley Psychology
Regulating emotions in a foreign tongue: The mediating role of psychological distancing
Emma Ward-Griffin
Graduate student, UC Berkeley Psychology
Divergent Paths to Anti-Bisexual and Anti-Transgender Prejudice Through Representation
[Blurb coming]