2025 Grant Recipients

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, recipients of the 2025 Bob Levenson Research Award.

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, recipient of the 2025 Bob Levenson Research Award.

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, recipient of the 2025 Bob Levenson Research Award.

Yi-Hsin Su
Graduate student, UC Berkeley Psychology

Understanding the Causes and Consequences of Decision Delegation in the Age of A.I.

As artificial intelligence has demonstrated unprecedented power to accomplish diverse tasks, it has become increasingly appealing to delegate more of our own tasks to these agents, including the task of making decisions. How it is that people decide to let AI agents make decisions on their behalf is largely unknown. This project aims to fill this gap by examining whether and when people delegate their decisions to AI. Specifically, we will identify the features of decisions that predict whether a person will make a choice themselves or will delegate it to an artificial agent, and the degree to which this depends on the type of agent available to them. We will also test how the availability of AI influences how a person feels about the choices they make themselves.

Özge Uğurlu, postdoctoral scholar, recipient of the 2025 Bob Levenson Research Award.

Özge Uğurlu
Postdoctoral Scholar, UC Berkeley Psychology

Regulating emotions in a foreign tongue: The mediating role of psychological distancing

Processing affectively-charged words in one’s second language attenuates emotional reactions; yet whether and how second language use might impact emotion and cognition in processing painful personal experiences remains unclear. To address this gap, my research examines psychological distancing as a plausible mechanism through a series of experimental studies with bilingual speakers. Specifically, we test whether writing about a negative autobiographical experience in a second language vs. a first language reduces emotional reactivity by increasing psychological distance.

Emma Ward-Griffin, graduate student, 2025 recipient of the Bob Levenson Research Award.

Emma Ward-Griffin
Graduate student, UC Berkeley Psychology

Divergent Paths to Anti-Bisexual and Anti-Transgender Prejudice Through Representation

[Blurb coming]