Sanjay Srivastava

Department of Psychology
University of Oregon
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Sanjay Srivastava is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oregonand director of the Personality and Social Dynamics Lab. He received his B.A. in psychology from Northwestern University and his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to coming to the University of Oregon, he was a postdoctoral research scientist at Stanford University. His research focuses on how personality affects and is affected by the social environment. This includes research on interpersonal perception, emotions, personality dynamics and development, and the psychology of online societies.

Research

(Note: More information can be found on my lab website.)

I study how personality affects and is affected by the social environment.

In work on interpersonal perception and self-perception, I am interested in what goes into forming an impression of someone – how the mindset of a perceiver, the attributes and behaviors of a person being perceived (like their emotions and personality), and the social context (like status hierarchies) all come together. And I am interested in the functions of interpersonal perception: why do people form impressions at all, and what do they do with that information?

In work on emotion processes in social contexts I study how emotions and emotion regulation affect processes of impression formation in the short term, and important social outcomes in the long term. 

In my work on personality dynamics and development, I am interested in how personality develops across the lifespan, and how it relates to important life experiences.

Recently I have also been starting to study personality in online societies, including how people express themselves online and interpret one another’s behavior, and how individual attributes fit into networks at multiple resolutions (egocentric networks, communities, and whole networks).

I am also very interested in research methods — how we can adopt new methods to produce new discoveries, and how the practice of science can be improved.

Teaching

I teach courses on a number of topics, including introductory psychology, motivation and emotion, social and personality psychology, and advanced statistics. The Psychology Department maintains a list of recent course syllabi that includes a few of mine.