Ian Hohm

Graduate Student

I am a PhD Student in Social/Personality Psychology working under the co-supervision of Jessica Tracy and Mark Schaller. Broadly, my research investigates how changes in human environments impact social values and attitudes. In one stream of research, [...]

Calista Leung

Graduate Student

Calista was the lab manager for the Emotion & Self Lab from 2018-2023, and a research assistant under Zak Witkower from 2017-2023. She completed her BA in Psychology at UBC, and is now in the process of completing her PhD in Clinical Psychology at Palo Alto University. Calista’s research focuses on facial emotion recognition ability and decision making styles in populations with depression, an idea that sparked from winning a Dragon’s Den research competition in the Emotion & Self Lab. At her time with the E&S Lab, she particularly enjoyed interviewing, mentoring, and interacting with research assistants and graduate students. She is excited to continue contributing to depression literature from a social psychology lens inspired from her research at the E&S Lab, and is excited to specialize in treating patients with depression in a clinical setting. In her spare time, you will find her trying to develop her Adobe Suite skills, alongside consuming a constant flow of milk tea. [...]

Eric Mercadante

Post-Doctoral Student

My research investigates how and why people act unethically to attain indicators of social rank (e.g., wealth, power, status) using multiple methods, ranging from self- and other-report surveys in cross-sectional and longitudinal designs to big-data approaches like natural language processing and analysis of large archival datasets. I address this topic from both the perspective of the individual actors seeking these rewards, with a focus on the interplay between personality and emotion, and the observers who evaluate those actors and their behaviors, from close others to society at large. [...]

Gordon Heltzel

Behavioral Research Scientist

Gordon graduated in 2024. Gordon’s research with Jess examined the intersection of morality, emotions, and the self. For example, in one line of research, Gordon and Jess examined how feelings of disgust influence moral judgments. In another, they examined whether appraisals about expectations play a role in eliciting self-conscious emotions, especially in morally relevant scenarios [...]

Aaron Weidman

Data Scientist

Aaron is an emotion and personality researcher focused largely on issues of measurement and construct validation of distinct emotions. He is currently a data scientist working in the finance industry. [...]

Conor Steckler

Research Associate

Conor is a social-personality and developmental psychologist whose research interests focus on the evolutionary function of distinct emotions and how emotions relate to morality. He is currently a Research Associate at Google. [...]

Joey Cheng

Assistant Professor

York University

Will Dunlop

Assistant Professor

University of California, Riverside

Azim Shariff

Assistant Professor - Canada Research Chair

University of British Columbia

Daniel Randles

Post-Doctoral Student

University of Toronto

Jason P Martens

Lecturer

Birmingham City University

Jeff Markusoff

Lab Manager

From 2008-2018, Jeff coordinated all research projects and research assistants involved in the Emotion and Self Lab. He spent his time in the lab ensuring that all projects were running efficiently and effectively, organizing the lab, writing Inquisit code, and conducting implicit emotion-status related research. Jeff is also a Registered Clinical Counsellor working with individuals, couples, and families in the Lower Mainland. [...]

Zak Witkower

Post-Doctoral Fellow

University of Toronto

I research how nonverbal behaviors (e.g., facial expressions and body movements) are used to express and interpret emotion, personality, and social status. Recently, I have been exploring whether distinct nonverbal behaviors are associated with distinct forms of social rank, along with the visual mechanisms observers utilize to form their perceptions of social rank (i.e., the Action Unit Imposter effect). I am also interested in whether the nonverbal communication of emotion and social rank is evolved or culturally constructed, and whether nonverbal expressions facilitate our ability to influence the behavior of others. [...]

Alec Beall

PhD

Amazon

Dr. Alec Beall received his Ph.D. in 2016 from the University of British Columbia where he was co-supervised by Jess and Mark Schaller. His research is informed by contemporary perspectives in evolutionary psychology and generally focuses on short-term mating, sexual attraction, parenting, and goal-oriented human behavior more broadly. With Jess, Alec has proposed a novel framework for understanding the evolutionary emergence of distinct emotions (e.g., happiness, romantic love, pride); specifically, he suggests that a host of distinct emotions have co-evolved with fundamental motivational systems to galvanize physiological, psychological, and behavioral responses geared towards solving recurrent adaptive problems encountered throughout hominid evolution. Alec and Jess have also investigated the role of emotion expressions on first-impression sexual attraction, the role of the color red on first-impression sexual attraction, and the role of women's menstrual cycle phase on clothing choice. His research is supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He currently works at Amazon and more information about Alec can be found linked below. [...]

Matthew Gervais

Assistant Professor

Brunei University

My work investigates human emotions from an evolutionary anthropological perspective. I'm particularly interested in the psychological bases of derived (and possibly unique) forms of human social behavior, including sharing, punishment, and tolerance, as these scale out to social relationships and social network dynamics. I've published on laughter and humor, psychopathy, moral parochialism, and contempt. Methodologically I'm a pluralist, combining naturalistic lab experiments and mixed-methods ethnographic field work. I have a regional focus in the Pacific, where I've conducted research in Fiji since 2009. I am currently an Assistant Professor at Brunei University. [...]