Academic interests
The overarching aim of my research, in collaboration with SIRL colleagues, is to map the understanding of fundamental forms of relations that emerge early in life. The relationships humans share often dictate the distributive principles for when, how, and to whom resources, care, and rights are allocated. This work investigates whether infants recognize and expect these distributive rules to apply following the relational logic that undergirds fundamental forms of relations. My primary focus is whether infants possess a core cognition system for recognizing, assessing, and motivating reciprocal cooperation. This research has shown that infants expect beneficiaries to reciprocate to former benefactors and display positive emotional evaluations of reciprocation while showing negative assessments of non-reciprocation. Infants anticipate that grateful recipients will return favors, but not ungrateful ones. Beyond reciprocal relations, at SIRL, I collaborate on projects investigating early emerging intuitions concerning concepts such as ownership, metaphoric understandings of relationships, social exclusion, and need. Mapping infants' understanding of their social world may uncover the evolutionary roots of human social cognition, which could form the basis of a social grammar that undergirds aspects of adults' social cognition as well.
Background
PhD candidate in social psychology, University of Oslo, 2020 – 2024.
MA in social psychology, University of Oslo, 2015 - 2017.
BA in cognitive psychology, University of Oslo, 2012 -2015.