Department of
Psychology
UCLA
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Jaimie Arona Krems
Associate Professor of Psychology
University of California, Los Angeles
Krems is a social psychologist with interdisciplinary training. Her research draws on theoretical perspectives from evolutionary anthropology, relationship science, + animal behavior to investigate how people create + navigate their social worlds.
Krems' primary research focus is on friendship. Krems is the Director of the new UCLA Center for Friendship Research and is a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award-winner for her work on friendship.
She has been elected a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP) and won the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) Rising Star Award. Her research has been published in top scientific journals, including Nature Human Behaviour, the Journal of Social and Personality Psychology, Psychological Science, + Evolution and Human Behavior.
Much of her work is driven by thinking first about women. Historically, social science research often assumed men's cognition + behavior to be defaults. Thinking systematically about women + some of the sex/gender-typical challenges they have recurrently faced generates novel research directions + facilitates the discovery of phenomena relevant across sex/gender (e.g., modes of friendship maintenance, competition tactics).
Krems currently serves as an elected member of the Executive Council at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES), where she led the creation of the ADAPT (Advancing Diversity Through Anthropological and Psychological Training) Program to increase access to mentorship + research training in evolutionary social science. Krems also served as an Open Science Advisor at Psychological Science.
CV
GoogleScholar
@JaimieKrems
jaimie.krems@ucla.edu
CURRENT GRADUATE STUDENTS
Nina Rodriguez
Nina is a fourth-year graduate student at UCLA, working with Dr. Krems + Dr. Daniel Sznycer.
Nina received her M.A. at California State University-Fullerton, where she conducted research on personality and status motivation from an adaptationist perspective. Her research interests include female competition, status acquisition, personality variation, and the influence of emotion and motivation on behavior. Her current work explores how people---and particularly women and other 'lower-power' individuals---bargain for better treatment in their social relationships.
website
ninrodr@ucla.edu
Tori Short
Tori is a last-year graduate student at Oklahoma State University. Her research utilizes approaches from developmental, evolutionary, and social psychology to examine the biological processes and behavioral strategies of female competition and health maintenance. She will be working at Grantify as a Senior Funding Analyst upon graduation.
CV
tori.short@okstate.edu
Yunsuh (Nike) Wee
Yunsuh (Nike) is a third-year graduate student working at Oklahoma State University working with Dr. Daniel Sznycer + Dr. Krems.
She is interested in issues of (a) value (e.g., how do people come to value things and other people) and (b) social processes surrounding information (e.g., what cognitive architecture regulates how people share information).
yunsuh.wee@okstate.edu
Vanessa Zankich
Vanessa is a first-year graduate student at UCLA, working with Dr. Krems. Broadly speaking, she is interested in identifying what kinds of social information people employ in order to navigate the complex challenges that characterize friendship formation, maintenance, and dissolution. Her research interests include self-disclosure, sociocultural identity, and prosocial/antisocial emotions (e.g., empathy, jealousy, envy) and behaviors (e.g., loyalty, competition, gossip).
vzankich99@ucla.edu
Hyewon Hong
Hyewon is a first-year graduate student at UCLA, working with Dr. Jaimie Krems in the Social Psychology area. He studies friendships broadly, but is specifically interested in the formation, maintenance, and related outcomes of adult friendships. I.e.: What makes someone a high-quality friend, what are the physical and psychological benefits of surrounding ourselves with these high-quality friendships, and how can we encourage the development and
maintenance of more good friendships.
Elias Acevedo
Elias is a first-year graduate student at UCLA, working with Dr. Martie Haselton (Communication) + Dr. Krems.
Elias received his M.A. from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, where he conducted research on emotion and error management biases. His research interests include emotion, status, value computation, and integrating predictive processing models of cognition with an adaptationist framework.
eacevedo89@g.ucla.edu
POSTDOCTORAL SCHOLAR
Lisa Walsh
Lisa Walsh (she/her) is an incoming Assistant Professor of Psychology at Nanyang Technical University in Singapore and was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the UCLA Marriage and Close Relationships Lab. She completed her Ph.D. in Social/Personality Psychology at the University of California, Riverside under the mentorship of Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky. In broadest terms, her work aims to investigate the links between interpersonal relationships (with friends, family, and romantic partners) and well-being, as well as understand the effects of positive social behaviors (e.g., expressing gratitude, doing acts of kindness).
Learn more about Lisa here.
RESEARCH SCIENTISTS
Victor Kaufman
Victor Kaufman (he/him) is a former graduate student and current Research Scientist of the UCLA Marriage and Close Relationships Lab. He received a master's degree in Psychology from Pepperdine University in 2015 and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology at UCLA in 2020. He primarily studies adult friendship and how close relationship processes uniquely affect well-being. He is also interested in psychometrics and how its application can aid our measurement of various phenomena in close relationships.
David Pinsof
David received his PhD from UCLA in 2018, where he studied psychology and biological anthropology. David's research focuses on political attitudes, mating strategies, signaling theory, the psychology of status, public opinion, mathematical models of alliance formation, and the origins of political belief systems.
He writes for a popular audience at everythingisbullshit.substack.com
AFFILIATED FACULTY + CENTERS
What is the psychology that enables people to interact with other people? Sznycer uses theories of selection pressures along with data from ancestral + modern humans to produce computation-level descriptions of our social psychology. His lab's research focus is on value computation, emotion, communication, morality, + institutions.
Krems + Sznycer often co-advise graduate students.
Williams is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Hamilton College, where she is also Director of Jurisprudice, Law and Justice Studies. She earned her JD and PhD concurrently.
Her work is multi-faceted, exploring stereotyping and prejudice at theintersection of justice and legal studies, friendship, and social affordances.
The UCLA Center for Friendship Research has a multi-pronged mission:
(1) Create + galvanize a multidisciplinary community of researchers
(2) Support cutting-edge friendship research
(3) Facilitate the hands-on training of future faculty elucidating friendship
(4) Communicate our findings broadly to improve friendships around the world
The UCLA Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture (BEC) unites scholars exploring the connections among evolution, culture, the mind, + society.
BEC provides a framework to facilitate research and training on the interaction among natural selection, cultural transmission, social relations, and psychology.
OCEAN (The Oklahoma Center for Evolutionary Analysis) is housed in the Department of Psychology at Oklahoma State University. OCEAN incorporates faculty + graduate students from across disciplinary boundaries---each using an evolutionary approach to understand social cognition + behavior.
OCEAN was founded in 2019 by Jennifer Byrd-Craven + Jaimie Arona Krems. OCEAN includes Jennifer Byrd-Craven, Jaimie Arona Krems, Daniel Sznycer, Juliana French, + multiple affiliated researchers.
News & Links
