SCAMP Lab
Social Cognition And Media Psychology

Skylar studies cooperation, competition, and small group interactions in virtual environment with game-like rules and systems. She draws from media psychology, social and cogntive psychology, game theory, and game studies to examine how people interact with each other under different settings as well as how they evaluate each other and become prosocial or antisocial toward each other. She is also interested in the psychological processes and outcomes of social interactions in single-player video games. Needless to say, she is also a big video game fan.  

Elisavet Averkiadi is a doctoral student within the Department of Media and Information at Michigan State University. Her research investigates users’ cognitive processing of their interactions with AI in persuasive contexts. Elisavet's research also examines the persuasive strategies employed by AI, with a focus on enhancing the ethical considerations and efficacy of such human-AI interactions. Elisavet also studies user behaviors within online group environments, utilizing computational methodologies to analyze creativity, productivity, and collaboration dynamics within Enterprise Social Media platforms.

Faith Delle is a doctoral student in the Department of Advertising + Public Relations with a background in Professional Communication and Psychology. Her research focuses on individuals' cognitive processing and meaning-making of mediated messages, examining the role of storytelling, message content, and emotion in persuasion. Through a media psychology lens, she investigates grief, trauma, and loss, utilizing quantitative methods such as eye-tracking, psychophysiology, and real-time response measures to understand and predict behavior.

Hanjie Liu is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Media and Information, focusing on technological platforms, psychological wellbeing, and self concepts. Her research investigates how relationally disadvantaged individuals (e.g., socially anxious, depressed, or ostracized) use social media and their differences in online information consumption. Approaching this from an empirical social science perspective, she employs experimental designs to better assist individuals with mental struggles in computer-mediated communications and understand the roles of negative moods and emotions in online message consumption. Hanjie is currently the editorial assistant for Journal of Communication.

Emily is a PhD candidate in Information and Media PhD program. Emily studies the psychological processes of AI agents and AI-mediated messages in terms of how people understand AI socially. Her research informs the effects of AI use and, more importantly, how to communicate about using AI to designers and social entities that deploy AI (e.g., companies and governments). Moreover, a broader scope of her study contexts encompasses social media user behavior, crisis communication, civic participation, digital application design, and gender-focused advertising content. Emily's research adopts a diverse range of methods, such as experiments, surveys, computational, and mixed-method approaches.