Flora is a second-year graduate student focusing on how social relationships impact well-being. She is interested in the psychologicaland physiological outcomes related to perceived social support, and how the source (i.e. friends, family) and degree to which one feels supported affect their mental and physical health. Currently, she is exploring the relationship between loneliness and inflammation in the body. Before UCLA, Flora attended The OhioState University. Since moving back to California, Flora has enjoyed walking her dog, skating and swimming at the beach, and using good weather as an excuse to get ice cream.

Bear Goldstein is a graduate student studying the neuroscience of teams. He is interested in how teamwork allows us to not only achieve beyond our individual capabilities but also forge meaningful interpersonal connections. Specifically, Bear uses mobile and motion-tolerant neuroimaging to explore the neural and behavioral responses of teams in real-time while also maintaining naturalistic interaction. Through a social-neuroscientific approach to teamwork, Bear aims to shed light on the underpinnings of positive team dynamics and the ways in which we may improve team outcomes, including creativity, cohesiveness, and collective success.

Hyewon is a graduate student at UCLA, working with Dr. Krems. More information coming soon.

Grace Qiyuan Miao is a graduate student in the Department of Communication at UCLA. Her research delves into the multimodal dynamics of interactions—including conversations, eye movements, body language, and neurocognitive processes—to understand how people communicate, connect, and form friendships.

Maria is a graduate student in the Social Affective Neuroscience Lab. She is interested in social connection, prosocial behavior, and self-transcendent emotions such as awe. In particular, she is curious about how shifting focus from the self to others influences well-being and social relationships.

Russell is a gradaute student in the Social Affective Neuroscience Lab led by Dr. Naomi Eisenberger. His primary research interest centers on prosocial behaviors, specifically the underlying neural mechanisms that support and reward doing good for others. In the center, Russell is interested in questions such as how we choose to maintain friendships and the neural basis of the benefits that we get from close friendships.

David received his PhD from UCLA in 2018, where he studied psychology and biological anthropology. David's research focuses on political attitudes, mating strategies, signaling theory, the psychology of status, public opinion, mathematical models of alliance formation, and the origins of political belief systems.

He writes for a popular audience at everythingisbullshit.substack.com

Nina N. Rodriguez is a PhD student in the social psychology program at UCLA. Her primary research interest investigates how individuals who lack traditional features of formidability (i.e., strength, social power) bargain with others for better treatment. Her work also touches on underexplored aspects of women’s status, leadership, and aggression. Her interests in friendship focus on two broad lines of questions: What behaviors and emotions are deployed when people encounter conflicts in their close relationships/friendships and what, if any, are the stereotypes/stigma associated with individuals who are friend-less?

Lisa is a graduate student in the Computational Social Neuroscience Lab at UCLA. She is interested in studying social neuroscience in the context of social networks. Specifically, she wants to investigate how individual differences in social network positions shape and are a result of interindividual variability in socio-behavioral tendencies (e.g., need-to-belong and trait-level curiosity) and underlying sociocognitive processes. One research question about friendship that she is exploring is whether neural similarity to naturalistic stimuli leads to or is a consequence of friendship.

Lisa Walsh is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the UCLA Marriage and Close Relationships Lab. She completed her Ph.D. in Social/Personality Psychology at the University of California, Riverside under the mentorship of Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky. In broadest terms, her work aims to investigate the links between interpersonal relationships (with friends, family, and romantic partners) and well-being, as well as understand the effects of positive social behaviors (e.g., expressing gratitude, doing acts of kindness).

Learn more about Lisa here.

Vanessa is a first-year graduate student at UCLA, working with Dr. Krems. Broadly speaking, she is interested in identifying what kinds of social information people employ in order to navigate the complex challenges that characterize friendship formation, maintenance, and dissolution. Her research interests include self-disclosure, sociocultural identity, and prosocial/antisocial emotions (e.g., empathy, jealousy, envy) and behaviors (e.g., loyalty, competition, gossip).

Dr. Thomas Bradbury is a Departmental Chair and Professor of Clinical Psychology at UCLA. Bradbury and his team have conducted several longitudinal studies that help explain how marriages change and how couples can keep their relationship healthy and strong. With funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the John Templeton Foundation, Bradbury and his collaborators have published more than 140 research articles, an undergraduate textbook on intimate relationships, and three edited books. Bradbury has also been honored with several awards for his research on marriage and intimate relationships, including the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Achievements from the American Psychological Association.

Dr. Dale is a cognitive scientist who studies the orchestral properties of communication–from the blink of an eye to the rhythm of a voice. Ever wonder how our eye movements sync during a conversation or how body language can spotlight a disagreement? Dale uses diverse research methods, including computational modeling, analysis of naturalistic behavior, and human experimentation. Dale has used these techniques to investigate a wide range of language-related phenomena with students and collaborators: conversation, thinking in language, sentence processing, word categorization, conflict, deception and more.

Dr. Andrew Fuligni’s research focuses on the interaction between sociocultural experiences and biobehavioral development among adolescents from diverse ethnic, immigrant, and economic backgrounds, with a current focus on youth’s prosocial behavior, contributions to their social worlds, and sleep. For more information, go to the Adolescent Development Lab at UCLA website.

As the Co-Director of the UCLA Center for the Developing Adolescent, Dr. Fuligni also works to translate and disseminate the science of adolescence to policy-makers and practitioners to support efforts that promote the healthy development of diverse youth.

Dr. Adriana Galván is a Professor of Psychology and the Dean of Undergraduate Education at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is also the Co-Executive Director of the  

UCLA Center for the Developing Adolescent. As a neuroscientist her career has been focused on adolescent brain development and how it supports milestones during this significant developmental window. Her research expertise focuses on characterizing the neural mechanisms underlying adolescent behavior to inform policies that impact young people.

Dr. Kerri Johnson is a Professor of Communication and Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Development. Her research incorporates diverse methods that are at the cutting-edge of communication science. This enables her to pinpoint with unprecedented precision the visual cues that send messages to others and how these cues are utilized by perceivers. In addition to traditional tools such as surveys and experiments, she using emerging methods to shed light on interpersonal communication processes.

Dr. Benjamin Karney is a Professor and Chair of Social Psychology at UCLA and an adjunct behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation. His research examines intimate relationships, especially marriage, and focuses on how relationships are facilitated or constrained by the contexts in which they take place. Currently, he leads the Los Angeles Project on Newlywed Development (LAPOND), a longitudinal study of low-income couples, and co-directs (with Thomas Bradbury) the UCLA Marriage and Close Relationships Lab. He has twice received the National Council on Family Relation’s Reuben Hill Research and

Theory Award for outstanding family science.

Dr. Robles’s research involves understanding how stress and social relationships influence health, with a focus on allostatic biological processes, which help individuals achieve physiological stability during stressful events; and restorative biological processes, which aid the individual in recovering after stressful events. Dr. Robles studies these biological processes in the context of stress, social support, and close intimate relationships across the life course.

Dr. Jennifer Silvers is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at UCLA. She conducts research on how social relationships impact emotion, learning and decision making across the lifespan and is currently testing how friendships differentially modify brain function to facilitate emotion regulation.

Visit the Social Affective Neuroscience & Development (SAND) Lab for more information.

Dr. Steve Stroessner is a social psychologist and Professor of Communication. He previously served as a Senior Research Scientist at Disney Research. His research examines cognitive and motivational aspects of stereotyping and prejudice, and he has published extensively on social categorization and the utilization of stereotypes in judgment. More recently, his research has examined social categorization processes in judgments of non-social entities ranging from shapes to robots.