In the Social Neuroscience Lab, Professor Puce and her collaborators are developing a model of emotion that is applicable to people in general. So this means considering potential differences in sex & gender, as well as race & ethnicity.

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Social Roles Lab

Provost Professor Diekman's research group investigates how individuals navigate the social structure, and how the social structure influences perceived and actual characteristics of groups. Her longstanding interest is in gender roles, and especially how gender roles have remained stable and changed over time.

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Holtzworth-Munroe Lab

Professor Holtzworth-Munroe's lab is not studying diversity directly, but because of where they conduct our studies, they often end up having underrepresented samples in their studies. For example, their NIJ funded study was conducted in DC court and their sample was about 85% self-identified Black/African American. In other, earlier studies in Indy courts, they often had samples with large proportion of Black study participants. And most of their research, conducted now in court-affiliated programs, involves many participants at the low end of the SES spectrum, often including rural families with low resources. Their newest studies allow self-identification as trans or non-binary, but they've just begun gathering data in that study. Occasionally, in their discussion sections of papers, they discuss some implications from these samples, but they have not directly compared subgroup based on identity nor directly studied disparities, etc.

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Neuroscience of Mind and Behavior Lab

Associate Professor Krendl's research addresses questions related to social stigma (e.g., race, age, gender, mental/physical illness), and how being stigmatized affects its targets.

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Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

Associate Professor Prieto's research seeks to uncover molecular mechanisms underlying cellular processes that drive neural development and develop tools to combat CNS damage or disease. She also looks to provide mentorship for students interested in pursuing a neuroscience research career.

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Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

Professor Bertenthal conducts research on racial, gender, and age biases related to photo sharing on social media.

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Developmental Psychopathology Lab

Professor D'Onofrio's lab studies health disparities in the etiology and treatment of psychological disorders. 

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Assistant Professor Green is a social psychologist with a focus on intergroup dynamics. Her research interests center broadly on understanding and addressing the factors that contribute to social inequality by focusing on social identity threat.

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Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Facial Expression Lab

Nearly all of Professor Hugenberg's research is focused on diversity, bias, or intergroup relations. Research in his lab focuses on how perceivers’ stereotypes, prejudices, and prejudice-related motives influence how we categorize, perceive, and understand others. Much of the work that they do has a particular focus on how perceptions of others’ faces and bodies interface with beliefs about social groups.

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Study of Affective Disorders’ Classification and Treatment (SADCAT) Lab

Assistant Professor Lorenzo-Luaces' lab addresses diversity-related issues in a few different ways.

Personalized medicine: They use data-driven algorithms to identify individual differences in treatment response and engagement according to variables like socioeconomic status, race/ethnicity, gender identity, etc. Across several studies, for example, they have found that unemployment status is a risk factor for poor depression outcomes, though unemployed individuals have relatively better outcomes with cognitive-behavioral therapies (CBTs) than other interventions.

Race/ethnicity and sexual orientation: In addition to their “data-driven” work, his lab also focuses on understanding dimensions of minoritized identity like being a racial-ethnic minority or being lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) and how they relate to the treatment of internalizing distress. They have studied how the efficacy of emotion-regulation strategies (e.g., reappraisal, suppression) for individuals with minoritized identity varies according to the nature of the stressors individuals face (i.e., minority-identity specific stressors vs. other stressors). They have also studied the acceptability of low-intensity (CBT; e.g., internet-based CBT) for individuals with minoritized identities (e.g., Black women). Robinson de Jesús-Romero and Amani Holder-Dixon are key collaborators in this work.

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Mind and Identity in Context Lab

Broadly speaking, Professor Murphy's research focuses on developing and testing theories about how people's social identities and group memberships interact with the contexts they encounter to affect their thoughts, feelings, behaviors, physiology, and motivation.

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Biobehavioral Alcohol Research Lab (BARL)

Provost Professor Finn received a IU Grand Challenge grant to study aspects of racial disparities in substance use research.

His work focuses on engaging college students of color as partners in research on the protective processes in decisions to drink alcohol. The first aim of this project is to engage with different Black student organizations and Black students using interviews and focus groups:

1. to find out their perspectives on, and experiences with, participating in psychological–behavioral research
2. to learn about their priorities for research on alcohol use
3. to learn about specific obstacles to participating in research on alcohol use that they may experience
4. to obtain suggestions for how to go about engaging Black students in this area of research.

The second aim of this project is to collect information about the social contexts, incentives, and disincentives associated with drinking among Black students and whether any of these factors may be unique to students of color or minority students in general. In addition, they will gather information on the factors that influence the drinking decisions of students of color in order to construct different decision-making scenarios that would be sensitive to the processes that might uniquely affect drinking decisions in students of color as opposed to White students.

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Associate Professor Rydell is a social psychologist with a focus on understanding the mechanisms underlying stereotype threat-based performance and learning decrements.

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Clinical and Cognitive Neuroscience Center

J Wolny is a doctoral student in Clinical Science under the mentorship of Professor Bill Hetrick. Their research focuses on understanding the mechanisms driving the racial disparities in the diagnostic rates of psychotic disorders, whereby Black Americans are 3-4x more likely to be diagnosed compared to their White counterparts. Within this domain, their present work employs psychometric methods (e.g., Item Response Theory) to begin parsing what may be adaptive or cultural paranoia (i.e., heightened, yet appropriate, levels of suspiciousness and mistrust due to racial oppression) in Black Americans, from clinical paranoia denoting psychopathological risk. In parallel, their work aims to identify the factors and experiences associated with race which may contextualize potential racial group differences in the expression of paranoia.

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