First conference as a lab!

The SoCoSci Lab made its way to Chicago to present research at the 2026 Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) Annual Convention, held February 26-28 at McCormick Place–our first conference outing as a lab!

Dr. Xie presented a talk on using high-dimensional approaches to model social perception across social identities and cultures, and Cy Butler delivered a talk on how gender ideals structurally constrain self-perceptions for both gender-conforming and gender-diverse adults. At the Self & Identity preconference, Tom Vanderkam presented a poster on new work that uses natural language processing to reveal narrative patterns of resilience in Ukrainian war narratives–and walked away with the Best Poster Presentation award. 🎉👏

Thank you to Gavin Mullin, Jon Freeman, Yanzi Huang, and Peter Mende-Siedlecki for organizing and chairing these respective symposia, and to Rebecca Cipollina and Joel Le Forestier for organizing the Self & Identity preconference.

Congrats to the other fantastic speakers and a special shoutout to my first grad student Cy and lab wizard Tom for representing our research so well at their first conference with the lab! ✨ #mentorfeels