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Dr Thora Bjornsdottir

Lecturer in Psychology

Psychology Stirling

Dr Thora Bjornsdottir

Contact details

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http://www.stir.ac.uk/people/thorabjornsdottir

我要吃瓜 me

I am interested in person perception and social cognition, with a focus on first impressions from faces.

I received my PhD and MA in Psychology from the University of Toronto, where I worked in the Social Perception and Cognition Lab under the mentorship of Nick Rule. I received my BA in Psychology and German from Cornell University, where I worked in the Implicit Social Cognition Lab with Melissa Ferguson.

After a postdoctoral research position at the University of Glasgow, I was a lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London for three years before coming to Stirling.

Research

I am interested in how people's social group memberships (such as social class, sexual orientation, culture, and nationality) affect social perception. My research specifically aims to understand:

  • how people's faces reflect their social identities and experiences (and how others detect this)
  • how people's group memberships impact their perceptions of others
  • how people mentally represent members of various social groups
  • how we can manipulate people's first impressions
  • the downstream consequences of people's first impressions

For more details and examples of my reseach addressing each of these questions, please see

Outputs (20)

Outputs

Article

Social Judgments from Faces and Bodies

Bjornsdottir RT, Connor P & Rule NO (2024) Social Judgments from Faces and Bodies. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000397

Article

Consensus Enables Accurate Social Judgments

Bjornsdottir RT, Hehman E & Human LJ (2022) Consensus Enables Accurate Social Judgments. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 13 (6), pp. 1010-1021. https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506211047095

Article

The visibility of social class from facial cues.

Bjornsdottir RT & Rule NO (2017) The visibility of social class from facial cues.. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 113 (4), pp. 530-546. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000091

Teaching

I teach on a variety of social psychological and social cognitive topics, including person perception, stereotyping, prejudice, and inequality.

I teach on the following undergraduate modules: PSYU901 – Introductory Psychology, PSYU9SP – Social Psychology

and MSc modules: PSYPDSS – Development of the Self in the Social World, PRMP131 – Research Methods in Psychology

I also supervise undergraduate and MSc dissertations.

Research centres/groups