Research groups
Colleges
Jelka Stojanov
BA
Emotions & Social Relations (Parkinson Lab)
DPhil Candidate
My Ph.D. research is concerned with understanding the top-down modulation of social perception, specifically, disentangling the effects of group membership and social context on how humans process socially and emotionally relevant information about others.
To explore these questions, I adopt two main approaches: (a) studying existing "morphologically ambiguous" social groups in post-conflict regions, and (b) employing a minimal group paradigm to investigate how between- and within-group competition and cooperation can explain biases in social perception and emotional judgments. In my experimental research, I also attempt to capture perceptual patterns (by using eye-tracking) as well as affective markers (by using psychophysiological recordings) which may reveal underlying mechanisms of inter-group emotion processing and social decision-making.
My Ph.D. project is funded by the Dulverton Trust (Dulverton Scholarship) and the Rotary Foundation (Rotary D1090 Global Grant) and supervised by Professor Brian Parkinson and Professor Geoff Bird.