Dr. Elizabeth Page-Gould

RESEARCH

When you are talking to a new person that you really want to impress, have you ever noticed your heart pounding or that your mouth has gone dry? What cues do you use to learn about this person? How do you encode meta-cognitions, such as what the other person thinks about you? Now add an intergroup component to the mix, such as when you interact with someone that has very different political views from yourself: How do your beliefs about the other person's views affect your perception and physiological reactions when interacting with that person? Elizabeth Page-Gould is fundamentally interested in the many modes of input that affect social cognition. Her research examines how the cognitive, physiological, and behavioral aspects of experience play into the way we perceive and organize knowledge about the social world. To answer these questions, Dr. Page-Gould's research simultaneously combines psychophysiological, social cognitive, behavioral, self-report, and quantitative methods to provide a comprehensive understanding of the factors that affect social interactions. She has a particular interest in intergroup interactions, which takes two main forms: 1) She applies experimental manipulations of cross-group friendship to examine how a close relationship with one outgroup member affects social interactions with novel outgroup members; 2) She experimentally manipulates cognitive and perceptual resources during interactions between outgroup strangers to examine the factors that facilitate or hinder successful encoding of novel outgroup members. Dr. Page-Gould's third line of work researches the embodiment of social cognition, such as how the peripheral nervous system responds to social cognitive processes and how these bodily responses in turn affect social perception.