Credentials
University of Colorado, B.A. in Economics
University of Colorado, B.A. in Psychology, minor in Philosophy.
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Laurea Specialistica in Developmental and Communication Psychology
University of Texas, Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology
Research Interests
Goals – Self-Regulation, Intentionality, Attribution, Embodied Cognition
Ownership – Counterfactual Thinking, Causal Reasoning, Property, Social Cognition
Morality – Theory of Mind, Intentionality, Emotions, Moral Cognition
Culture – Knowledge Representation, Motivation, Visual Perception, Cultural Cognition
Teaching Areas
Art – Evolution – Cognitive Science, Language and Culture, Culture and Cognition, Research Methods in Psychology, General Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Scientific Communication in Psychology.
Teaching Philosophy
My primary goal in teaching is to help students develop the analytical skills required for understanding, practicing, and benefiting from scientific research. The ability to critically evaluate the assumptions and implications of research is a critical skill within psychology and other fields. In order to master this skill it is important for students to understand psychology as a process rather than a result.
So many students enter University with a view of science as established fact and of education as memorizing those facts. In my courses, I balance discussion of what we know with exploration of how we know it. Rather than explaining individual theories of a given domain, I aim to present competing theories. I emphasize the motivations, assumptions, and predictions of a theory, as well as its relationship to data, both in terms of the findings that support it and in terms of the ways it could be tested or disproved. The goal is to help students understand the fundamental role of theory in organizing our knowledge and directing further research, and to give them the skills to evaluate the evidence that support those theories.
About Teaching at Umbra
Within the Study Abroad environment, my desire is to give students an understanding of how theories, models and research can relate to their study abroad experience by demonstrating that the human motivation system is informed and transformed by one’s culture.