Don Erhardt / UBC Brand & Marketing
Tuum Est. It is yours.
UBC Psychology extends our warmest gratitude to our graduating students for allowing us to be a part of your journey. We are excited to see you walk across the stage at UBC’s fall 2023 graduation ceremony on November 22, 2023.
Congratulations and hats off to our students!
MA Graduates
Name: Miranda Bahng
Thesis Title: The story of fitting in : cultural fit and subjective well-being
Name: Melanie Butt
Thesis Title: Out-of-home mobility: A measure of daily cognition in young adults
Name: Maria Clara Brandao
Thesis Title: “That’s not right!”: error detection as a potential mediator between the number sense and formal math in children
Name: Erin T. Fitzpatrick
Thesis Title: Does sexual satisfaction mediate daily associations between body satisfaction and relationship satisfaction in new parent couples?
Name: Bronwen Grocott
Thesis Title: Biased interpretation of ambiguity in state and chronic loneliness
Name: Cameron Hall
Thesis Title: The development of structural reasoning about social inequality
Name: Vasileia Karasavva
Thesis Title: To intervene or not to intervene? ‘Bystander Intervention’ in cyber-aggression
Name: Nick Kay
Thesis Title: Cultural change fast and slow: a novel measure of the speed of cultural change
Name: Jess Lee
Thesis Title: Being in the minority: how gender (under)representation influences children’s reasoning about group dynamics
Name: Yunru Ma
Thesis Title: Preschooler’s evaluation of authority figures’ third-party punishment of a moral transgression
Name: Talia Morstead
Thesis Title: Pandemic stressors and depressive symptoms: Examining within and between-person effects of neuroticism
Name: Mathilde Rioux
Thesis Title: A novel intervention for persistent memory symptoms after concussion: a pilot randomized controlled trial
Name: Omran K. Safi
Thesis Title: Investigating the effects of emotion on temporal duration memory using naturalistic virtual reality.
Name: Nicole Stuart
Thesis Title: Light, moderate, and vigorous physical activity and 9-year changes in cognitive performance: test of age moderation
Name: Victoria Wardell
Thesis Title: How Childhood Adversity Relates to Associative Memory for Emotional Stimuli
Name: Andre Zamani
Thesis Title: Neural activation associated with the reporting of spontaneous thoughts in experienced mindfulness meditators
Name: Paradox Zhou
Thesis Title: Distinguish the bifactor and higher-order factor model: a comparison of three RMSEA-related approaches under model misspecification.
M.A. students Carmelle Bareket-Shavit, Melanie Butt, Sabrina Ge, Yingchi Guo, Marta Kolbuszewska, Miranda Long, Yunru Ma, Grayson Mullen, Aaron Reiss, Chaoyi Shi, Shuyuan Shi, Zohreh Soleimani, Irein Thomas, and Ruolin Wu are also graduating in fall 2023.
Ph.D. Graduates
Name: Dr. Gabriel Brooks
Citation: Dr. Brooks examined the relationships between gambling and video games, specifically “loot boxes”, a feature where players pay for in-game randomized rewards of varying value. He found that gambling-related cognitions are associated with loot box use, and that loot box use also predicts subsequent gambling. These results support the regulation of loot boxes.
Name: Dr. Denitza Dramkin
Citation: Dr. Dramkin investigated how we map number words to perceptual magnitudes. Her work shows that by understanding the shared logic between number words and perceptual scales, young children can readily attach number words to their perception of numbers, length, and area, and even perform intuitive mathematic computations (e.g., division). Their thesis is titled: ‘Mechanisms underlying the interface between number words and perceptual magnitudes‘.
Name: Dr. Adri Khalis
Citation: Dr. Khalis examined how social media might impact psychopathology and vice-versa. He found that certain aspects of social media use can increase the risk for depression, anxiety, and ADHD symptoms, and that psychopathology can also influence how we use these platforms. This research underscores the importance of the online context to our well-being.
Name: Dr. Yeeun Archer Lee
Citation: Dr. Yeeun’s thesis is titled ‘Prosocial behaviour as an antidote to social disconnection: Exploring the links between prosocial behaviour, loneliness, and social contact in daily life‘.
Name: Dr. Eric Mercadante
Citation: Dr. Mercadante investigated how emotional responses to acquisition vary based on an individual’s level of dispositional greed. His work finds that greedy people are unique in their tendency to feel a short-lived burst of pride in response to acquisition, and no different compared to non-greedy people in terms of hedonic positive emotions like happiness. His thesis is titled: “How does it feel to be greedy? The role of pride in avaricious acquisition“.
Name: Dr. Anita Schmalor
Citation: Dr. Schmalor’s thesis is titled: ‘SES, Inequality and Me: The Effects of Subjective Socioeconomic Status and Perceived Economic Inequality on Self-Centeredness‘.
Ph.D. students Drs. Audrey Aday, Gabriel Brooks, Holly Engstrom, Yeeun Lee, Yu Luo, Alison Nutini, Brent Stewart, and Alexander Terpstra are also graduating this week.
