Graduate Students

Our lab will review PhD applications this fall for students starting in Fall 2026. For more information about applying, visit the USC Psychology graduate admissions page and the prospective student resources page.

Recent Directions

A core theme of our work has been examining the interplay of learning and choice (e.g., reward, planning, valuation) with social cognition (e.g., impression formation, closeness, empathy, social identity) in social decision-making. We draw on a range of approaches from social cognition & social psychology, social neuroscience (fNIRS, fMRI), and computational modeling of cognition. For instance, some of our recent work has examined:

1) How people learn from social rejection and acceptance, across behavior, neural computation, social networks, and naturalistic conversations.

2) How social expertise helps people learn more easily, across reinforcement learning and gist memory, along with implications for empathy. More generally, we have been exploring how different memory systems contribute to learning about self and other.

3) How collective identity, moral cognition, and connection intersect, including how social identification shape’s cognition; how people come to identify with groups; and how people navigate interpersonal moral disagreement.

Undergraduate students

We are looking for motivated undergraduate students to join the lab as Research Assistants and Honors Students. If you have any questions or are interested in joining our lab, please email Evans Alvarez, the lab manager, for application materials.