Social Cognition Lab

Where the questions get real.

The Social Cognition Lab at St. Joseph's University New York is student-driven and theory-curious. Undergraduates don't assist on someone else's study — they design and run their own, on the questions that won't leave them alone: self-compassion, body image, identity, and the moral psychology of how we treat ourselves and one another. Below are two recent projects, each one a student's first real encounter with the difference between having a hunch and testing it. For the mentorship behind this work, see Mentorship.

Undergraduate Research · SJNY

Loving yourself a little more than your selfies.

Romão Nóbrega, V., & Magee, M. W. Undergraduate poster, St. Joseph's University New York.

Every feed is a gallery of idealized bodies, and the comparison rarely ends well. Victoria asks whether self-compassion — meeting your own body with the warmth you'd give a friend — can buffer that pressure. Her proposed 2×2 study crosses self-compassion (high vs. low) with the image viewed (a fashion model vs. an everyday woman), predicting that people who treat themselves kindly stay more satisfied with their bodies no matter what the screen shows. Kindness, it turns out, may be the best filter we have.

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Undergraduate Research · SJNY

Even the compliments can hurt.

Phanjavidze, A., & Magee, M. W. Undergraduate poster, St. Joseph's University New York.

“You look so good in this picture” — surely that helps? Ana's study says otherwise. She randomly assigned 375 adults to read positive, negative, or neutral appearance comments on a mock Instagram post, then measured body image. It was the positive comments that left people more dissatisfied than neutral ones did — praise about appearance still trains attention on being looked at and judged. Women reported greater body dissatisfaction than men across the board. The kindest move, it seems, may be to say nothing about the body at all.

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