Psychology Research Labs and Projects

explore your interests

We welcome you to participate in our ongoing labs and projects—and find the one that is right for you. Please contact the faculty listed in each subject area below to get involved in research and gain valuable experience that you can apply to future careers in psychology.

Exceptional Experiences Research Lab (EERL)

Dr. Christine Simmonds-Moore conducts research on exceptional experiences, including alterations in consciousness, experimental parapsychology (i.e. extrasensory perception and mind-matter interactions), subjective paranormal phenomena, and transpersonal/spiritual experiences. Her projects include psychometry, float tank experiences, and extrasensory perception, in addition to ecological consciousness and extrasensory perception. Other members of the lab include Dr. Jake Glazier who conducts research on local folklore.

Narrative Research

Dr. James Christopher Head conducts narrative research that explores narrators’ experiential accounts in order to understand how they navigate the material conditions of their lives, construct meaning from those experiences, and negotiate the psychological complexity of those meanings. He is currently supporting a group of doctoral students to construct narrative research projects that investigate narrators’ navigation and negotiation of salient historical moments. This working group is an extension of the Narrative Psychology course (PSYC-7810B).

abstract painting by student Robin Butler

Phenomenological Art Collective

The Phenomenological Art Collective is an arts-based research lab launched by Dr. Nisha Gupta that guides UWG students to disseminate qualitative research to the public through the expressive arts for community healing, psychoeducation, and social change. The lab teaches students a three-step process that follows the methodology of arts-based phenomenological research for public scholarship:

Conducting phenomenological research about people’s psychological and sociocultural experiences
Expressing research findings as art such as film, poetry, and paintings
Exploring ideas to disseminate the phenomenological art to the public to initiate therapeutic community dialogues through workshops, screenings, exhibitions, and events.

abstract mixed media photography and painting

Living Language Lab

Dr. Marie-Cécile Bertau engages a group of graduate students in research around language viewed as a dialogical process that relates the interpersonal with the intrapersonal dimensions of experience. The group investigates:

How different voices are lived and experienced by individuals
How voices influence meaning-(form)-making
How the collective or cultural voice belonging to a community’s social-cultural norms and beliefs is represented through media, on objects and buildings, and through certain others.

Besides understanding and further developing theorizing, the lab allows common analyses of language data that translate into students’ research projects.

Psychological Studies of Science and Technology (PSST!)

Dr. Lisa Osbeck works with students to explore the psychological dimensions of science—science as practiced by persons—which overlaps with the philosophical study of science and with science and technology studies (STS). Student projects have included studies relating to replication, generalizability, the psychology of model development, imagination in science, motivation for commitment to environmental science, psychological case studies of scientists, and values in psychology, using theoretical and qualitative inquiry.

abstract art with partially obscured person

Moral Injury and Mattering Lab

Dr. Richard La Fleur works with students in the moral injury and mattering lab to explore the felt sense and impact of moral injury in people in the context of recent world events and the shame, helplessness, and guilt that can result from that.

While moral injury and mattering are closely connected, we distinguish what they are and how they shape our experiences. Moral injury refers to the psychological, emotional, and spiritual suffering that arises when deeply held moral beliefs are violated, by one’s own actions or the actions of others, in various contexts.

Mattering, by contrast, speaks to the relational experience of being needed, valued, and significant to others. To matter is to feel that we are worthy of attention, that our presence makes a difference, and that we both depend on others and are depended upon in meaningful ways.

artwork with miniature houses on stair steps

Clinical Ethnography Lab

Dr. Talia Weiner works with students to use ethnographic research methodologies to explore the intersections of clinical interactions, cultural conventions, political processes, and lived experiences. By reading and producing ethnography, students in this working group analyze questions about the interplay between psychiatric expertise and individual experiences of mental illness, interrogate psychiatry and psychology as social institutions, and reflect on the role of the ethnographer’s situated subjectivity in the research process.

Discourse and Social Interaction Lab

Dr. Neill Korobov works with graduate students to both conduct and read discourse analytic research—critical discourse analysis and applied conversation analysis—around a range of topics that include identity, gender, and romantic partnerships. For the last several years, he has worked with students to explore the ways couples pursue intimacy, connect, and create affiliation while bantering, telling stories, arguing, and sharing their desires.

Existential Psychology Lab

Dr. John L. Roberts engages with and supports graduate students in research involving existentialist orientations into experience, meaning making, and suffering. These inquiries draw upon historically grounded existential themes such as anxiety, being-in-the-world, and being-for-others, with an emphasis on their appearance in psychology. Such research explores intersections with other philosophical traditions, including postmodernism, feminism, and natural science understandings of psychological life. Participants discuss their own particular research projects by forming reading groups and receiving feedback on their writing processes.

Research Labs and Projects

Learn by Experience.