Graduate Student Research and Publications
The department adopts a mentorship model of graduate education in which students work closely with a faculty advisor during their two years in our program. Typically there is a 2:1 graduate student:faculty ratio that provides the student with individualized attention and, therefore, superior training. Students conduct both a first year research project and a thesis.
We admit students into the program rather than to work with individual faculty members. Nonetheless, we do our best to match students with their preferred advisor whenever possible, and thus having a good match with one or two faculty members is an important part of the admission decision. Thus, we encourage you to highlight at least one or two professors who might be good matches to your interests. If your interests are still broad, that’s fine, but provide us with some indication of the type of research you are interested in doing.
Most faculty begin working with one new student each year; however, the faculty available to take new students in their lab varies from year to year for various reasons (e.g., sabbaticals, number of openings in a lab, etc.). You are welcome to contact a faculty member to see if she or he anticipates taking a student – please see the department’s faculty web page for research interests and contact information.
Follow this link to view a list of completed Thesis projects.
Recent Publications
Note that the list below is not an exhaustive list of recent publications that our grad students have co-authored based on work done at Wake Forest.
*Bossert, S. A., Jayawickreme, E., Blackie, L. E., & Cole, V. T. (2024). Further exploring the impact of cumulative lifetime adversity on life satisfaction, psychological flourishing, and depressive symptoms. Journal of Research in Personality, 110, 104488. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2024.104488
*Chu, X., Givens, T. V., Liu, Y. R., Hessong, A. C., *Zapffe, L., *Zhang, Q., … & Cole, V. T. (2024). Parsing the Prospective Links from Externalizing and Internalizing Symptoms to Substance Use: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Current Addiction Reports, 11(6), 1085-1095.
*Crawley, H. K., Jayawickreme, E., & Furr, R. M. (In press). Moral character: A personality perspective on morality. In D. Lapsley & J. Gibbs (Eds.) Research Handbook on Lifespan Moral Development. Edward Elgar Publishing.
*Li, C., & Kiang, L. (in press). You Are Not One of Us: The Consequences of Ingroup Versus Outgroup Prejudice on Asian Americans. Asian American Journal of Psychology.
*Luo, J., McRae, K., & Waugh, C.E. (2024). Committing to Emotion Regulation: Factors Impacting the Choice to Implement a Reappraisal after Its Generation. Emotion. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001455
*Lyu, X., Hunter, M. D., Burt, S. A., *Good, R., Carroll, S. L., & Garrison, S. (2025). Detecting mtDNA Effects with an Extended Pedigree Model: An Analysis of Statistical Power and Estimation Bias. Behavior genetics, 55(4), 320–337. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10519-025-10225-1
* Sims, E. E., Trattner, J. D., & Garrison, S. M. (2024). Exploring the relationship between depression and delinquency: A sibling comparison design using the NLSY. Frontiers in psychology, 15, 1430978. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1430978
*Vlasenko, V.V., Tucker, W.K., & Waugh, C.E. (2024). Temporal orientation of positive reappraisal. Emotion, 24(5), 1286-1298. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/emo0001331
*Wilson, L., Klausner, M., Chuang, S., Patel, S., & Pratt, W. E. (2024). An examination of the effects of nucleus accumbens core nociceptin on appetitive and consummatory motivation for food. Behavioural Brain Research, 28;462:114895, doi: 10.1016/j.bbr.2024.114895.
Stone, E. R., Parker, A. M., *Somerville, A. H., *Nixon, B., *Kemmerly, R., & Bongard, M. M. (2025). Influencing confidence: Testing ways to increase or decrease confidence in knowledge. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bdm.70048
Petrocelli, J. V., *Li, Y., *Wang, E., & *Curran, J. M. (2024). Bullshitting and bullibility: Conditions and consequences. Social Psychology, 55, 262-279. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-9335/a000561
Parker, A. M., *Somerville, A. H., *Kemmerly, R., & Stone, E. R. (In press.) Psychological and behavioral consequences of confidence in knowledge: An exploratory examination of general public and JDM researcher perspectives. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making. https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.70023
Waugh, C.E., Schieber, M.*, Zhao, Y.^ (2025). Feeling good about the bad: Making positive appraisals of predominantly negative stressors. Emotion. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0001517
Kiang, L., Lopez Alvarez, D., Lassiter, R., & *Nixon, B. (2024). “Ew, what’s that smell?” Asian Americans’ experiences of culinary racism. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 15(4), 394–408. https://doi.org/10.1037/aap0000357
Austin, K. D., *Crawley, H. K., Fleeson, W., & Furr, R. M. (In press). Using generative artificial intelligence to advance hypothesis-driven scale validation: Identifying criterion measures and generating precise a priori hypotheses. Assessment.
Soland, J., Cole, V., Tavares, S., & *Zhang, Q. (2025). Evidence That Growth Mixture Model Results Are Highly Sensitive to Scoring Decisions. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 60(3), 487–508. https://doi.org/10.1080/00273171.2024.2444955