IOWA MORALITY LAB
The University of Iowa
Department of Psychology
Lab Director //
C. Daryl Cameron, Ph.D. | Assistant Professor
140 Spence Laboratories of Psychology
Daryl Cameron earned his B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy from the College of William and Mary, and his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Daryl was appointed as a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Duke University Kenan Institute for Ethics and is currently appointed as Visiting Assistant Professor at the Stanford University Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE). His first line of research focuses on causes and consequences of compassion. This research focuses on the motivations (i.e., fear of compassion) and mechanisms (i.e., emotion regulation) that explain lapses of compassion in response to large-scale disasters and stigmatized victims. This research also examines the consequences of compassion regulation for moral identity and moral behavior. His second line of research applies constructionist models of emotion to human morality: for instance, he has found that people who have highly differentiated emotion concepts can prevent incidental affect from shaping their moral judgments. His final line of research uses process dissociation to decompose the role of automatic and controlled processes in moral judgment among student and clinical populations. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation.
Staff //
Victoria Spring | Lab Manager
218 Spence Laboratories of Psychology
Victoria graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2012 with a degree in psychology. She is broadly interested in the affective and cognitive processes involved in moral judgment. She is also interested in the regulation of empathy as well as the influence of mind-blindness, empathic accuracy, and dark triad personality traits on moral decision-making.
Research Assistants //
Ali Ajram | Research Assistant
Bio currently unavailable.
Jordon Bell | Research Assistant
Jordon is an undergraduate psychology student in his senior year. His main interests lie in social psychology. More specifically, he would like to explore moral and religious psychology, and how they may interact and influence each other.
Christine Crow | Research Assistant
Christine is an undergraduate psychology student. She is interested in social, moral, personality and positive psychology and the ways in which they inform one another. In particular, she is curious about how the psychology of individuals interacts with social phenomena like conflict, cultural narratives, and social change.
Yu Han | Research Assistant
Yu is a junior undergraduate student majoring in psychology and management. She is generally interested in social psychology especially how people behave and relate to each other. She wants to stand on the first line of psychology and looks forward to getting more research experience by joining the lab.
Xiaotian He | Research Assistant
Xiaotian is an undergraduate student studying psychology and sociology. She is interested in social psychology, like why we offer help to others and how our moral line builds.
John Michael Kelly | Research Assistant
John Michael graduated from Northwestern University in 2013 with a bachelor's degree in psychology. He is interested in the field of social psychology, especially the study of altruism, group cohesion, and social affiliation. He is hoping to soon pursue his doctorate in social psychology.
Chance Lacina | Research Assistant
Chance is an undergraduate psychology student. He is interested in a range of psychological phenomena such as sports psychology, counselling psychology, evolutionary psychology, how we come to understand the world, how beliefs form and operate on the mind, cognitive biases, how rational our moral intuitions are, what their bases are, and how we can hope to truly understand one another.
Affiliates //
Jenny Jiao | Graduate Affiliate
Jenny is a fourth year doctoral student in the Marketing program at the University of Iowa. Her research interests fall in the area of consumer behavior and judgment and decision-making, specifically moral licensing, loneliness, emotions, and goal pursuit.
Jillian O'Rourke | Graduate Affiliate
Jillian's research focuses generally on social influences on judgment and decision making. She is interested in how social comparison, optimism, and risk or uncertainty influence people's choices and behavior. She is also interested in reducing decisional biases in health related decision making.
Aaron Scherer | Graduate Affiliate
Aaron is broadly interested in the causes and consequences of biased beliefs, with an emphasis on how information seeking and use influence beliefs and subsequent evaluations and behavioral intentions. While his research interests primarily intersect with social, health, and political psychology, he also has side interests in moral cognition and psychology of religion.
Kelsey Thiem | Graduate Affiliate
Generally, Kelsey’s interests span the subfield of stereotypes and prejudice. More specifically, she is interested in the ways that stereotypes can influence individuals’ self-perceptions and how people choose to categorize individuals who have ambiguous group memberships.
Halley Woodward | Graduate Affiliate
Halley is a fifth year clinical psychology doctoral student. She examines individual differences in indirectly and directly measured affective evaluations of foods that vary in terms of their nutritional characteristics. She is also interested in questions pertaining to the relative contributions of automatic and controlled processes to affective evaluations and to eating behavior, as well as individual differences in the salience of and associations between arousal and valence dimensions of affect.