Nicholas Rule
Principal Investigator

Dr. Rule is Professor of Psychology and presently serves as the department Chair. He completed Ph.D. and M.S. degrees at Tufts University and an A.B. at Dartmouth College. Formerly a Tier-II Canada Research Chair, Dr. Rule has received a number of awards, including early career awards from the International Social Cognition Network, the International Academy for Intercultural Research, the Ministry of Research and Innovation of Ontario, as well as the Sage Young Scholars Award from the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology. He formerly served as Acting Chair of the Psychology Department, as Interim Vice-Dean, Undergraduate in the Faculty of Arts & Science, and is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. For more information about Dr. Rule's research interests, please click on the Research link above or browse his Publications.



POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCHERS
Zak Witkower investigates fundamental questions about the emergence and utility of nonverbal behavior for the communication of emotion, personality, and social rank. He employs a wide variety of methods and research designs to explore these topics, including behavioral coding (e.g., with the Facial Action Coding System, or FACS), highly controlled experiments, structured group interactions to assess intra- and inter-group processes, the measurement of testosterone and cortisol from saliva to assess the convergence of nonverbal behavior with biological markers, and longitudinal designs to explore changes in emotion and rank attainment strategies over time. He also actively seeks participants from different populations, including students from the United States, Canada, Japan, Germany, and members of a small-scale traditional society in Nicaragua, in order to investigate how nonverbal behavior is used to communicate emotion and social rank around the world.


GRADUATE STUDENTS
Emily is a third-year PhD student. She received her BSc in Psychology from McGill University in 2019 and received her MA in Psychology from the University of Toronto in 2020. Her research primarily examines how gender and sexual orientation affect social perception outcomes, with a focus on the role of stereotypes and intergroup processes. She also has a secondary line of research examining perceptions of virtual pseudo-social entities such as language AIs and digitally-generated voices.
Mac Morgan is a second-year PhD student. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto and received his bachelor’s degree in 2020. He is interested in person perception from limited contexts (such as at distance or online) and cues (such as their artistic pursuits), and how those perceptions influence the ways we relate to one another.


GRADUATE ALUMNI

Dr. Laura Tian
Molly Sun
Prof. Jason Deska
Dr. Ravin Alaei
Prof. Thora Bjornsdottir
Dr. Shelbie Sutherland
Prof. Miranda Giacomin
Dr. Daniel E. Re
Dr. Konstantin O. Tskhay
Prof. John Paul Wilson


UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS
Current as of May 2023

Qi (Kay) Sun (Lab Manager)
Aurora Almonte
Julia Bérubé Boutin
Sera Gandhi
Shakura Kabir
Catherine Ma
Myah Meleca
Vikki Pham
Ivy Catherine Rogers
Juliana Sarychev
Joanna Sie
Mei Yang