Welcome!

About me

Hello! My name is Valeria Pfeifer (she/her) and I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri - Kansas City (UMKC) in the Department of Psychology and Counseling. 

My research broadly encompasses the Psychology of Language, asking questions about how language relates to cognition, emotions, and aging. For example, I am interested in how language use relates to wellbeing, or how understanding and producing language changes with increased age. 

In addition, I work on expressing and perceiving emotion via language. For example, I am interested in the social-emotional functions fulfilled by verbal irony, such as managing negative emotions or indexing interpersonal relationships. Learn more about my theoretical framing and work on irony by checking out my latest publication in Current Directions in Psychological Science (2024) or listening to this great podcast about it. 

You can find my recent publications here  or on Google scholar. 

Before coming to UMKC, I was a postdoc at the University of Arizona with Dr. Matthias Mehl, where we studied everyday language behavior via naturalistic observation and associate it with psychological constructs. I was also a part of the Precision Aging Network.

Emotion regulation with irony was the topic of my dissertation with Dr. Vicky Lai at the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language lab at the University of Arizona.