We Are Recruiting Couples for a New Study!
We’re recruiting couples for an in-person study that Jadyn Park is running in the lab! If you are in the Chicago area and are interested in participating, please see here for more information.
Mystie Saturday Presented at the Shared Reality Conference
Mystie Saturday gave a data blitz talk at the Shared Reality Conference, showcasing results from her first-year project about the role of storytelling and narratives in developing family identities.
Lydia Emery Named an APS Rising Star
Lab Director Lydia Emery was named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science, an award presented to early career researchers post-PhD. See the full list of this year’s awardees here!
CEDAR Lab at SPSP 2025
Dr. Lydia Emery presented at the SPSP (Society for Personality and Social Psychology) Close Relationships Pre-Conference in a methods panel on recruiting more inclusive research samples, and gave a talk in a symposium on how relationships are especially key to identities and well-being for lower-SES couples. Dr. Erin Hughes received the Graduate Student Paper Award for our 2025 JPSP paper on how avoidantly attached people believe they are losing themselves in their relationships — despite no external evidence suggesting that they are (see earlier news and a link to the paper). Congrats, Erin!
In addition to presenting, the CEDAR lab had a great joint lab dinner with Princeton University’s ARC lab!
New Paper about Merging in Close Relationships
We have a new paper in press at Current Directions in Psychological Science with Emma McGorray, Erin Hughes, and Abdo Elnakouri on the theme of merging in close relationships. In the paper, we review the literatures on merged selves, goals, processing, and reality; aim to put them into conversation; and generate ideas for future research.
New Paper about Contextual Approaches to Social Class
We have a paper in press at the Journal of Social Issues with Nicole Stephens and Sarah Townsend about the value of taking a contextual approach to understanding social class. We describe what it means to take this kind of approach, and how it might yield new insights on the psychology of social class.
Stephens, N. M., Emery, L. F., & Townsend, S. S. M. (in press). Taking a social-class-in-context perspective on the psychology of social class. Journal of Social Issues.
New Paper about Attachment and Couple Identity Clarity
We have a new paper in press at EJSP with Erica Slotter, Alexis Audigier, and Wendi Gardner about attachment avoidance and couple identity clarity. People who are high on attachment avoidance struggle to maintain a clear sense of who they and their partner are as a couple, in part because they are less close with their partners and because their partners do not accurately know them.
Slotter, E. B., Emery, L. F., Audigier, A., & Gardner, W. L. (2024). Making sense of “us”: Mechanisms linking attachment avoidance and couple identity clarity. European Journal of Social Psychology. Advance online publication.
Mystie Saturday Joins UChicago First-Year Scholars Program
First-year PhD student Mystie Saturday has joined the 2024-2025 cohort of First Year Scholars in the Social Sciences Division. Congrats, Mystie!
New Paper about Attachment and Loss of Self
We have a new paper in press at JPSP with Erin Hughes, Emma McGorray, Wendi Gardner, and Eli Finkel. We find that people high on attachment avoidance perceive change due to their close relationships as losing parts of themselves, which contributes to lower commitment to their relationship. Furthermore, we find a disparity in perceptions, such that external metrics (including their own behavior and third-party coders) do not detect loss of self among avoidant people.
Hughes, E. K., Emery, L. F., McGorray, E. L., Gardner, W. L., & Finkel, E. J. (in press). The delusion of the disappearing self? Attachment avoidance and the experience of externally invisible self-loss in romantic relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. [Download]
CEDAR Lab in the New York Times
Lab Director Lydia Emery spoke to the New York Times about how to support a friend going through a divorce, highlighting research about rediscovery of self after a breakup.
CEDAR Lab at SPSP 2024
Dr. Lydia Emery presented work from the CEDAR lab at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) conference in San Diego; at the Close Relationships Pre-Conference, she gave a data blitz presentation about how experiencing housing instability affects relationship dynamics.
Emma McGorray received the Graduate Student Paper Award for our 2023 JPSP on relationship science research samples (see earlier news and link to the paper). She gave a talk at the Close Relationships Pre-Conference discussing her work. Congrats, Emma!
CEDAR Lab at SESP 2023
Dr. Lydia Emery presented work from the CEDAR lab at the Society of Experimental Social Psychology (SESP) annual conference in Madison, WI. Her talk focused on how couples’ identities differ based on the couple’s social class contexts, and implications of relationships for health and well-being in lower-SES contexts.
New Paper about Recruiting Lower-SES Participants
We have a new paper in press at AMPPS with collaborators David Silverman and Rebecca Carey on best practices around recruiting and working with lower-SES participants. In this paper, we suggest that the primary considerations when working with lower-SES participants are trust and accessibility. We provide recommendations about how to build these key factors into each stage of the research process, from designing a research question to well after the data are collected and published.
Emery, L. F., Silverman, D. M., & Carey, R. M. (in press). Conducting research with people in lower socioeconomic status contexts. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science.
New Paper about Relationship Science Research Samples
We published a new paper in JPSP with Emma McGorray, Alexandra Garr-Schultz, and Eli Finkel about who the typical participants are in relationship science research samples. Across two time periods and 1,762 samples, we examine the following sample characteristics: gender, sexual orientation, regional context, socioeconomic status, and race. We find significant limitations in terms of who is included in the typical relationship research sample, and we also examine changes in reporting practices over time. Finally, we end by issuing recommendations about best practices for recruiting and reporting inclusive research samples.
McGorray, E. L., Emery, L. F., Garr-Schultz, A., & Finkel, E. J. (2023). “Mostly White, heterosexual couples”: Examining demographic diversity and reporting practices in relationship science research samples. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 125(2), 316-344.