Lab Members

Lab Director

Brian Lickel, PhD

Dr. Lickel’s research focuses on how people interpret events in intergroup conflicts and how these interpretations affect their emotions, self-concepts, and support for different social and political policies. A key assumption in his work is that understanding people’s emotions is important for unlocking the processes that amplify or reduce intergroup conflict.

Much of his work has examined what determines the emotions that occur in the context of violent intergroup conflicts and how these emotions predict support or opposition to intergroup aggression. Besides understanding people’s reactions to these macro-conflicts, he also studies emotional reactions in interpersonal situations where inter-group conflicts come into play (such as people’s reactions to observing anti-Muslim discrimination in the United States).

Looking forward, the two primary themes of his upcoming research are:

• Understanding how the cognitive and emotional processes of individuals are influenced by (and influence) the social and political processes in groups during intergroup conflicts.

• Understanding the processes by which people reflect on and change their personal values and entrenched habits, particularly in contexts that evoke feelings of anxiety and shame.

Current Graduate Students

Heather Kumove

Heather A. Kumove, is a fourth-year graduate student in the Peace and Violence program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her BA with honors in Psychology with a minor in Government in 2017 from Reichman University (formerly the Interdisciplinary Center Herzilya, Israel). Her work focuses broadly on identifying factors contributing to intergroup violence, harm-doing, and political polarization. Her work specifically explores how beliefs can be shifted to promote peaceful and less extreme attitudes. The aim of her research is to identify factors which contribute to the perpetration of intergroup violence, with the ultimate goal of helping to prevent future atrocities.

Current Honors and Independent Studies Students

Amanda Selke

Amanda is a senior studying psychology and business. She has an interest in the impact of belonging and purpose on perceived well-being. Following the completion of her undergraduate degree, Amanda is considering a master’s program with a focus on workplace wellbeing and organizational change. In the future, she would like to facilitate macro-level change in organizations by studying the efficacy of current wellness-promoting strategies in the workplace.

Current Undergraduate Research Assistants

Olivia Berin

Olivia is a senior studying both psychology and Spanish. She is interested in researching the effect of social media and technology on people's mental-health and development. Olivia plans to pursue her Doctorate in Counseling Psychology, but is also considering a Masters in Social Work. After college, she plans on continuing to study Spanish in order to connect with more people. In the future Olivia hopes to provide counseling to both English and Spanish-speaking populations.

Sophia Brandt

Sophia is a sophomore studying psychology and mathematics with a concentration in statistics and data science. She is interested in the intersection of climate change and mental health, focusing on how to use psychological research and clinical techniques to promote climate justice. With their math background, Sophia hopes to continue to research in graduate school and eventually pursue a doctorate in an area related to climate or social psychology.

Karina Rome

Karina is a junior majoring in Psychology and has received a human resource certificate. She is interested in implementing psychological principles and findings into the workforce. She aims to attend graduate school and obtain her master's to become an industrial organizational psychologist. Karina hopes to use psychological principles to advance numerous businesses' work styles and create a much more productive and positive workspace for companies.

Sophie-Zoe Schreyer

Sophie-Zoe is a junior studying Psychology and German. She is interested in the application of psychological knowledge to various social dynamics and issues, including climate change and intergroup conflict. She plans to continue doing research in graduate school, likely near family in Canada or Germany, in order to broaden her perspective and be able to contribute to the field of Psychology.

Former Graduate Students

Andrea Mah, PhD

Andrea received her MS and Ph.D in social psychology at UMass Amherst Psychology & Brain Science program. At UMass, Andrea studied stress and coping responses to climate change, and responses to climate adaptation under the supervision of Dr. Lickel. She defended her dissertation in May 2024, titled 'Public engagement with climate change adaptation: Three investigations of the communication of environmental issues.' Andrea is currently employed as Post-Doctoral Scholar at Oregon State University, where she supports the work of the Cascadia CoPes Hub.

Min Suh, PhD

Min Suh received his MA and Ph.D in social psychology at UMass Amherst Psychology & Brain Science program. In working with Dr. Lickel, Min studied psychological, cultural, and emotional processes in the context of various social issues, including climate change and other environmental issues. He defended his dissertation work, titled “Examining shifts in racial attitudes in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death and the 2020 BLM Protests,” and is currently working as a user experience researcher at Adobe.

Joel Ginn, PhD

Joel’s research interests remain in the field of social and environmental psychology. His main interests are social identity and its relationship to pro-environmental behavior and beliefs about social change processes. Particularly, Joel studies identification as an environmentalist and other 'practice-based' identities (e.g., meat-eater) and how these identities may impact perceptions and beliefs about social change actions. His research also examines how beliefs about the necessity for individual and structural action to address social issues impact action and policy endorsement. He hopes that his research will lead to strategies that promote action and mitigate reactance, backlash, and intergroup conflict among social change actors.

Joel completed his Ph.D. in the summer of 2022 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Boston College, advised by Dr. Gregg Sparkman.

Hema Preya Selvanathan, PhD

Hema received her BA in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire in 2014. Hema’s research as a graduate student focused on collective action and intergroup contact for social change. Specifically, she investigated three interrelated questions: 1) What are the factors that motivate participation in collective action?, 2) How do people respond to efforts for social change?, and 3) How can intergroup contact be utilized to promote social justice? To answer these questions, she employed various techniques, including quantitative and qualitative methods, with cross-sectional, experimental, and longitudinal designs in both laboratory and field settings, all with a goal to promote equality and justice in society.

Hema completed her PhD in 2019. She now serves as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Queensland's School of Psychology.

Daniel Chapman, PhD

Daniel Chapman received his BA in both Psychology and Government & Political Affairs in 2013 from Millersville University. As an undergraduate he conducted a number of research projects on how different types of psychological threat influence public policy preferences. He also served as a research assistant for an initiative in Millersville University’s Center for Disaster Research and Education involving academic institutions in four countries seeking to collaborate on topics related to natural disaster risk reduction and resiliency.

Daniel earned his PhD in Social Psychology at UMass-Amherst in 2018. He now serves as the Research Director at the See Change Institute and is additionally a Research Fellow at Yale Law School.

Daniel Chapman’s website

Manisha Gupta, PhD

Manisha obtained a BS in Business Administration, and a BA in Social Welfare, from the University of California at Berkeley before joining the program at UMass. During graduate school, the majority of her research focused on investigating antecedents and consequences of prejudice between ethnic minority groups, and methods of improving cross-ethnic coalition building, for which she was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Manisha earned her PhD in 2015.

After completing her PhD, Manisha worked as a Science and Technology Policy Fellow with the United States Senate. This program provides psychologists with an interest in policies that affect the psychological development of children with an invaluable public policy learning experience, an opportunity to contribute to the more effective use of psychological knowledge in government, and an opportunity to broaden awareness about the value of psychology-government interaction among psychologists and within the federal government.

Manisha now works as a science, policy, and data consultant.

Rachel Steele, PhD

Rachel holds a Master’s in peace and justice studies from the University of San Diego. She worked at the United States Institute of Peace for three years addressing governance and legal issues in Iraq and post-conflict justice and reconciliation in a variety of settings. Prior to attending graduate school, she worked with peace activists in Seattle and volunteered in the Philippines with the Mennonite Central Committee working alongside local peace-builders.

Addressing gaps in research on the effectiveness of war crimes trials and truth commissions, Rachel explored the conditions that can aid in a society’s psychological recovery from armed conflict and wide scale human rights abuses with a particular focus on the roles of reparations and apology. She earned her PhD in Social Psychology from UMass-Amherst in 2016.

Rachel now works as an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Salisbury University.

Former Post-Docs

Özden Melis Uluğ, PhD

Özden Melis Uluğ holds a BSc major in Psychology and a BA minor in Studies in Politics from Middle East Technical University in Turkey. She received her MSc degree in Political Psychology with distinction from Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland in 2011 and her PhD degree in Psychology from Jacobs University Bremen in Germany in 2016.

She focused on the socially shared conflict understandings among different segments of society (e.g., politicians, scholars and journalists, and laypeople) in the context of the Kurdish conflict in Turkey. She has also conducted follow-up studies in order to understand the role of intergroup contact in different status groups on conflict understandings and peace-related outcomes, such as attitudes toward reconciliation and peace.

In addition to intergroup conflict, reconciliation, and peace, her research interests also include collective action and solidarity between disadvantaged groups. She conducted both qualitative and quantitative studies on protesters’ motivations and their solidarity experiences in different contexts such as Turkey and the U.S. She additionally conducted research on how disadvantaged groups such as women and Blacks experience contact with the advantaged groups in the context of protests and activism as well as on the relationship between people’s understandings of democracy and protests.

Özden is now a Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology at Clark University.

Hanne M. Watkins, PhD

Hanne M. Watkins holds a BA (Hons.) in Psychology and Linguistics, and a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of Melbourne, in Australia. She also completed her Ph.D. in Social Psychology at the University of Melbourne, in 2016. Her main research interests are moral psychology, intergroup conflict, and philosophical “just war theory,” which is why her thesis was on how people make moral judgments about killing in war.

However, moral psychology is a broad church, and for two years she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UPenn working with Geoff Goodwin on a project involving people who are exceptionally commitment to various environmental causes. Many of these “environmental exemplars” express a moral obligation to care for the natural environment and for future generations of humans. Through in depth interviews they attempted to unpack this sense of obligation, as well as explore how it relates to the environmentalists’ sense of connection to nature and to other people, and to their optimism (or pessimism) about the future of the planet.

As part of the Psychology of Peace and Violence Program at UMass, Hanne continued to research both environmental and moral psychology, focusing especially on how people conceptualize war and peace (are the two concepts antonyms? Do they include moral content, good or bad? Are wars inevitably associated with environmental destruction as well as with the destruction of human life?) and the consequences these conceptualizations have for outcomes such as willingness to support specific peace building initiatives, engagement with veteran community groups, and the likelihood of joining the military.

Hanne now works as an adviser with the Australian government's Behavioural Economics Team.

Hanne M. Watkins' website

Former Honors and Independent Studies Students

Sakina Bengali

Zara Mahmood

Melanie Maimon

Seana Read

Rebecca Schmidt

Lily Vesel

Lily graduated from UMass in 2019. She currently serves as the Clinical Research Director of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

Regan Woodnutt

As a student at UMass-Amherst, Regan double-majored in Psychology and Legal Studies, with interests in cognitive, forensic, and social psychology, including Applied Behavior Analysis, just-world beliefs, stereotypes, attitudes and perceptions, memory formation and recollection, and computer modelling of cognitive functions. Regan earned her BS from UMass in 2020. She currently works as a Research Assistant at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.

Eva Tipps

Eva is a senior biology major with a minor in natural resource conservation. Her research interests are in ecology and climate change, and specifically the roles that humans play in that field. She is currently working on a thesis that will experimentally test how thinking about covid-19 frames people's perceptions and emotions regarding climate change. Outside of the lab, Eva is a member of the UMass sketch comedy troupe, Sketch 22.

Lab Members

Lab Director

Brian Lickel, PhD

Current Graduate Students

Heather Kumove

Current Honors and Independent Studies Students

Amanda Selke

Current Undergraduate Research Assistants

Olivia Berin

Sophia Brandt

Karina Rome

Sophie-Zoe Schreyer

Former Graduate Students

Andrea Mah, PhD

Min Suh, PhD

Joel Ginn, PhD

Hema Preya Selvanathan, PhD

Daniel Chapman, PhD

Manisha Gupta, PhD

Rachel Steele, PhD

Former Post-Docs

Özden Melis Uluğ, PhD

Hanne M. Watkins, PhD

Former Honors and Independent Studies Students

Sakina Bengali

Zara Mahmood

Melanie Maimon

Seana Read

Rebecca Schmidt

Lily Vesel

Regan Woodnutt

Eva Tipps

Amanda Selke

Former Undergraduate Research Assistants

Wenxiu Wang

Tianyi Zhang

Catherine Hurley

Sadaf Nasiri

Maria Arvanitis

Frederica Badoe

Kate Beckley

Katie Burke

Samantha de Carvalho

Olivia Couto

Zac Douglas

Shana Fleischman

Christine Formosa

Irene Gao

Olivia Gebski

Jennifer Gulick

Ryan Keough

Catherine LaPlant

Joanna Imbert Leon

Bridgette Masse

Kelley Murray

Xiaolin Ni

Devin Parziale

Hailey Pensky

Jules Rezende

Cassidy Robert

Gwenn Swift

Emma Torres

Eleanora Vosburg

Hannah Waris

Erika White

Ran Wei

Madeline Wigon

Raine Woodman

Elaine Wu