UBC Graduation
Tuum Est. It is yours.
Each year, our graduating MA and PhD students push the boundaries of psychological science, asking sharper questions and offering deeper insight into how people think, feel, behave, and relate to their worlds.
From early-childhood development to cross-cultural personality patterns, from sleep and stress to brain networks in infancy, their work reflects the breadth of our field and the many ways psychology can shape society.
Meet the Class of 2025 and learn more about their research.
PhD graduates
Dr. Ashley M. Battaglini
Research Area: Clinical Psychology
PhD Dissertation: Intra- and interpersonal emotion regulation flexibility
Citation: Dr. Ashley Battaglini examined emotion regulation (ER) flexibility (adjusting ER strategies based on context) and its association with emotions in daily life. Across three studies, Dr. Battaglini explored intrapersonal and interpersonal ER. This work has implications for the wellbeing of the general population and those with clinical depression.
Dr. Matthew I. Billet
Research Area: Social & Personality Psychology
PhD Dissertation: Antecedents and outcomes of spiritual connections to nature
Citation: Dr. Billet examined people’s spiritual connections with nature across the world. He found that these spiritual connections shape our psychology in a consistent way across diverse cultural and religious populations. This work challenges current models of culture’s role in environmental psychology and helps chart a way forward.
Why did you choose to study at UBC Psychology?
The Social & Personality area offers a world class program on research related to culture, evolution, and morality. The faculty are friendly, collaborative, and generous, and created a culture that any graduate student would feel privileged to take part in. As a consequence, UBC Psychology creates excellent graduates.
What drove you to study your line of research?
A fascination with the diversity of religious belief, which reflects the many answers that humans have given to the deepest most consequential questions we ask about ourselves and about our world.
What advice do you have for others considering graduate school?
Your faculty and peers will have an influence on who you become as a researcher (and to some extent, since you will be in graduate school for many years, as a person) – choose them wisely.
Dr. Yoonseok Choi
Research Area: Health
PhD Dissertation: Motivation in context : the role of sociocultural contexts
in shaping everyday goal pursuit across the adult lifespan
Citation: Dr. Choi studied everyday goal pursuit and its link to emotion and well-being. Contrary to common belief, his research shows that goal pursuit accompanied by negative emotions such as worry can also be functional, depending on context. By considering life stage or culture as key factors, his work broadens our understanding of everyday motivation.
Dr. Mikayla Pachkowski
Research Area: Clinical Psychology
PhD Dissertation: Coping with suicidal ideation : a cross-sectional and longitudinal examination
Citation: Dr. Pachkowski’s research examined how people cope when they are suicidal. She found that maladaptive coping methods appear to worsen suicidal thoughts, while increased knowledge and confidence in coping can reduce them. Her research provides valuable insights into how people can safely cope with and manage suicidal thoughts.
Dr. Nada Alaifan
Research Area: Cognitive science
PhD Dissertation: Valence influences on episodic memory: a cognitive processing account
Citation: Dr. Alaifan’s dissertation investigated the cognitive processes underlying the conscious feelings triggered by positive and negative emotional events, as well as the cognitive mechanisms that enhance memory for such events. In her work, Nada proposed a novel cognitive-science account of these processes and used it to predict the outcomes of her experimental work, as well as those from a meta-analysis of memory for emotional and non-emotional events.
Dr. Dunigan Folk, Dr. Kevin Roberts, and Dr. Elizabeth Zambrano Garza also received their PhD degrees.
MA graduates
Yangyilin Guo
Research Area: Social & Personality Psychology
MA Thesis: Regional personality differences across Colombia, Japan, and New Zealand
Seonwoo Hong
Research Area: Clinical Psychology
MA Thesis: The prospective impact of parents’ interpretation biases on adolescent anxiety and depressive symptoms
Ruoning Li
Research Area: Social Psychology
MA Thesis: A Random Human Peer is Better Than a Highly Supportive
Chatbot in Reducing Loneliness Over Time
Brian Liu
Research Area: Clinical Psychology
MA Thesis: Social determinants of health
and pediatric concussion recovery
Andres Montiel
Research Area: Clinical Psychology
MA Thesis: The quality and stability of friendships in children with ADHD: A comparison of boy-boy, girl-girl, and mixed-gender dyads
Nesli Oguz
Research Area: Developmental Psychology
MA Thesis: Pathways to prosocial sharing
in early childhood
Peiying Wen
Research Area: Behavioural Neuroscience
MA Thesis: Effect of electroconvulsive shocks on retrograde memory and
engram reactivation
ZHU Jingyun
Research Area: Developmental Psychology
MA Thesis: Frontoparietal Network Engagement in Task and
Task-Free Session in 8-Month-Old Infants
Anuki Amarakoon, Simone Goldberg, Raymond Li, Michael Mask, and Charlotte Stewardson also received their MA degrees.
We are proud of them and the impact they are making at UBC and beyond.
Congratulations to the Class of 2025!
