© 2024. Theme based on Hyde
© 2024. Theme based on Hyde
Moral disagreements are common in everyday life and people can respond to them in many ways, from avoiding and terminating interaction, to switching topic and keeping silent, to perspective-taking and working with the other side to find common ground. How should these responses be organized, and how can we predict which response an individual will adopt in a particular situation?
In my dissertation, I propose that responses to interpersonal moral disagreements can be understood as emotion regulation processes. According to this framework, responses to disagreements cluster into groups that reflect well-characterized emotion regulation strategies, including situation selection, reappraisal, and suppression. In turn, we can predict which response an individual will choose using both trait-level emotion regulation tendencies and situation-level perception of the cost and benefit of pursuing each strategy.
Preliminary findings from this project were presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) 2024 Conference. The preprint will be available soon.
Valuing the welfare of others is a fundamental component of human empathy and prosocial behavior. How do people develop this valuation in the first place?
In this line of work, I propose that people can learn to value the general welfare of others through a simple associative learning mechanism–Pavlovian conditioning. When another person’s affective states consistently predict our own outcomes, we may attach reward to that person’s abstract affect, thereby coming to feel either congruent or incongruent emotions towards the general welfare of that person.
Preliminary findings from this project were presented at the Society for Affective Science (SAS) 2021 Conference. The preprint will be available soon.
Social rejection is prevalent in human societies and is consequential to health and well being. By definition, social rejection involves at least two parties–the rejector and the rejected. However, rejection rarely takes place in a social vacuum. How people respond to rejection depends not only on the dyadic relationship between the two parties, but also on the complex social network they are embedded in. In this line of work, I examine how the structure of the rejector’s social network affects how people respond to rejection.
Recently, I completed my Master’s thesis based on this project. Findings from one of the three studies were also presented at the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) 2022 Conference.