Third Year
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| Jennifer Hahn |
Jennifer Hahn
Jennifer received a BA in Psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focus is on interactions between relatively new environmental factors, such as oral contraceptives and paternity testing, on mate selection preferences and investment strategies. Using experimental and cross-cultural methodologies, Jennifer hopes to gain insight into how evolved mating strategies are interacting with the influx of environmental change.
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1312 Email Jennifer
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| Bethany Heywood |
Bethany Heywood
Bethany graduated from the University of Vermont in 2005 with a BA in the subject of Religion, focusing on comparative aspects between modern mainstream religion and folk traditions. Her current project focuses the different topics, common themes, and varying perspectives present in narratives about important memories, and also how these topics, themes, and perspectives vary with different demographic characteristics such as age, education, religion, culture, and location, as well as other factors.
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1312 Email Bethany
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| Mitch Hodge |
Mitch Hodge
Mitch graduated from the University of Texas Arlington with BAs in philosophy and classical studies (1997) and an MA in humanities (2006). His MA thesis proposed an interdisciplinary cognitive approach to mythology incorporating anthropological structuralism and mental models theory. Mitch's current research interest is determining whether humans are intuitive Cartesian substance dualists in reasoning about death. He is once again employing an interdisciplinary approach to suggest a social embodiment theory, which proposes that humans do not intuitively view themselves as mind and/or bodies as maintained by many contemporary theories concerning what has been called "the folk psychology of souls."
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1312 Email Mitch
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| Colin Holbrook |
Colin Holbrook
Colin is currently investigating the influence of unconscious affect on incidental evaluation in the United States, Northern Ireland and Tibet, testing an alternative interpretation of the "worldview defense" effects portrayed as adapted modular outputs by both terror management and coalitional psychology theorists. Colin graduated from UC Berkeley in 2000 with degrees in Cognitive Science and Religious Studies. Before joining the ICC, Colin worked with gravely mentally disabled adults as a certified Mental Health Rehabilitation Specialist in California. Colin's research interests also include moral cognition, categorization, affective neuroscience, and Buddhist psychology.
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1312 Email Colin CV
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| Steven Hrotic |
Steven Hrotic
Steven's primary interests concern universal patterns of human behavior as rooted in our evolutionarily constrained cognition. This has led him to study primate behavior, religion, and implicit cultural schema. Following a year of fieldwork, his current research investigates how academic thought and practice, idealized as perfectly objective and impersonal, may nevertheless reflect biases based in our biological heritage. An experiment is underway which will test relatively unexperienced academics' ability to discern characteristics in professional academics' writing styles, using predictions based in evolutionary psychology.
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1312 Email Steven
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| Oratios Ierodiakonou |
Oratios Ierodiakonou
Oratios is in the writing-up stage of his doctoral thesis after he managed to replicate successfully Justin Barrett’s study on systematic misrememberance [Justin L Barrett, "Cognitive Constraints on Hindu Concepts of the Divine," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37, no. 4 (1998)]. The replication took place in Cyprus among Greek-Orthodox monastic and student participants. Oratios’s research provides data supporting his claims that explicit, systematic and intensive religious instruction can bring about significant changes to such an extent that intuitive anthropomorphic interpretations of god properties are replaced or suppressed in favour of explicitly learned concepts.
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| Kaisa Ruokanen |
Kaisa Kouri
Kaisa's interest in the foundations of human religiosity led her to study theology, first in Hamburg, Germany and later in Helsinki, Finland. There she finished her master's studies in comparative religion, concentrating particularly on the cognitive science of religion. In her current project she focuses on exploring the cognitive foundations of god concepts - both theologically correct and incorrect.
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1340 Email Kaisa
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| Claire White |
Claire White
Claire received a BSc in Psychology from Queen’s University. Her research investigates people's inferences about the continuity of personal identity. She draws on the literature about reincarnation beliefs to investigate how people are able to represent and track reincarnated agents in a way that preserves the link with their extant identity (or uniqueness). Claire will combine experimental analysis with theoretically targeted cross-cultural replication of empirical designs. Experiments will be conducted in Northern Ireland and India. Experimental results may also give substance to claims that reincarnation beliefs are constrained by the universal features of the human mind.
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1340 Email Claire
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| Gordon Ingram |
Gordon Ingram
Gordon has a BA in Archaeology & Anthropology from Oxford University and an MSc in Cognitive Science from Manchester University. His research is on young children's reporting of other children's behaviour. He has used a mixture of participant observation and behavioral ecology to study this behaviour in two Belfast pre-schools. He is also conducting experiments to see how well children recall various types of social and non-social information. Gordon's work is informed by an evolutionary perspective, viewing children as exemplars of the uniquely human tendency to resolve disputes by bringing them into the public sphere, rather than by direct confrontation. In this respect, reporting of peer behaviour is similar to gossip in adults, but there are important differences between the two types of talk.
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1340 Email Gordon
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| Jared Piazza |
Jared Piazza
Jared transferred from the University of Arkansas where he spent a
year as a graduate student of Experimental Psychology. Jared’s specific
research interests include gossip, secrecy, reputation management,
social emotions (e.g., shame), theory of mind, and altruistic behavior
in humans. In general, he is interested in human psychological
adaptations to language and the adaptive problems entailed by
information transmission. He has also done research in the cognitive
science of religion.
Phone: +44 (0) 28 9097 1312 Email Jared