Social/Personality Laboratory
-
Director
Professor Nick Haslam+61 3 8344 6379
Research Overview
Our Laboratory investigates topics that bridge social and personality psychology. Our social psychological work explores interpersonal and intergroup phenomena including dehumanization, objectification, the stigma of mental illness, and essentialist thinking. Our personality research focuses on whether personality traits and mental disorders are best conceptualized as continuous dimensions or discrete categories.
Our primary focus in the last six years has been on ‘concept creep’, the semantic inflation harm-related concepts such as bullying, trauma, mental illness, and prejudice. We are carrying out research on how concept meanings are changing within psychology and the wider culture, using methods from computational linguistics applied to large text corpora, and exploring the causes and consequences of holding expansive concepts of harm.
Staff
Current members
Ekaterina Vylomova (postdoctoral fellow)
Morgan Weaving (PhD student)
Jesse Tse (PhD student)
Naomi Baes (associated researcher)
Collaborators
Emory University
Monash University
University of California, Los Angeles
University of Edinburgh
University of Leuven
University of Nagoya
Funding
The research is currently supported by an ARC Discovery Project grant
Research Publications
For a full, regularly updated list of publications, see Google Scholar.