UCLA Psychology Department: A Hub of Cutting-Edge Research

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), nestled in the vibrant landscape of West Los Angeles, stands as one of the ten distinguished campuses within the University of California system. Positioned a mere five miles from the Pacific Ocean, UCLA benefits from the dynamic energy of Southern California. Bordered by the scenic Santa Monica Mountains and the Getty Museum to the north, and the lively Westwood Village with its array of theaters, restaurants, and the Armand Hammer Museum to the south, the university offers a rich and stimulating environment for both students and faculty. Among its many esteemed departments, the UCLA Psychology Department is a vibrant center for innovative research and comprehensive graduate training.

Comprehensive Graduate Training

The UCLA Psychology Department is committed to rigorous scientific training and offers a graduate Ph.D. program with area emphases in Behavioral Neuroscience, Clinical, Cognitive, Developmental, Health Psychology, Quantitative, Social, and Social and Affective Neuroscience Psychology. The central objective across these fields is to cultivate researchers who are dedicated to expanding the scientific knowledge base of psychology. The program is meticulously designed to prepare psychologists for successful careers as researchers, college and university instructors, and professional research psychologists.

The department fosters student participation in various interdisciplinary activities through collaborations with other departments, schools, and organized research units within the University. These include the Brain Research Institute, the interdisciplinary Neuroscience and Cognitive programs, the Institute for Social Science Research, and the Neuropsychiatric Institute, all of which provide extensive research facilities. Additionally, the Psychology Clinic serves as a valuable departmental resource. The department's close ties with local hospitals, clinics, and institutes, including the Veterans Administration, provide unique opportunities for year-round training and research. Graduates are well-prepared for positions in academia, research organizations, governmental bodies, and the business sector. The Psychology Ph.D. program is one of 18 Ph.D.

Research Opportunities and Resources

The UCLA Psychology Department distinguishes itself by providing a wealth of research opportunities and resources for both undergraduate and graduate students. These opportunities are designed to foster intellectual curiosity, develop research skills, and promote the advancement of psychological science.

Undergraduate Research

UCLA offers numerous avenues for undergraduate students to engage in psychological research:

UCLA Psychology Undergraduate Research Conference (PURC): Held annually each Spring at UCLA.
UCLA Undergraduate Research Week: Held each May, providing a platform for undergraduates to present their work in poster format.
UCLA Undergraduate Psychology Journal: The Undergraduate Research Journal of Psychology (URJP) is an online journal published by students interested in cross-disciplinary psychological research.
UCLA Interim Policy 906: The interim Undergraduate Researcher Laboratory Safety Policy (Policy 906) outlines the necessary safety requirements and prohibitions on research and other activities that involve undergraduate student researchers and highly hazardous materials.
UC LEADS: Offers fellowships and guidance to promote research over a two-year span.

Specific Research Labs and Projects

The Department houses a diverse array of research labs, each focusing on specific areas within psychology. Examples of research opportunities include:

The Rational Altruism Lab: The Rational Altruism Lab is a purpose-driven team with the mission to strengthen the scientific foundations for improving the future of humanity. The Rational Altruism Lab conducts research in four core areas: Moral learning and moral decision-making, Identifying the most impactful questions that psychological science can ask by developing a general method for predicting the social impact of scientific research on different topics, Understanding and promoting effective well-doing, and Improving institutional decision-making.
Inclusive Ethics Initiative: The work of our Inclusive Ethics Initiative supports researchers, educators, and the general public in exploring how an inclusive approach to ethics- which entails the equitable participation for all stakeholders in the establishment, evolution, and enforcement of ethical norms-can help people across the globe to successfully address their differences.
National Neuropsychology Network: Preference for students who have taken Psych 120A, 120B and/or 186C, have played tradition card games, such as Magic the Gathering, Legends of Runeterra, Hearthstone, etc., or have worked with Psychopy and Pavlovia. Students should be familiar with data cleaning and data analysis in R and/or Python, as well as as data analysis methods such as correlation, linear/logistic regression, and ANOVA/ANCOVA.
Speech Perception and Production Lab: Much of our work explores how people understand and produce speech, how these processes develop and change over time, and how they influence our everyday interactions. Many of our studies involve computerized tasks where participants respond to different types of speech or language-based stimuli.

Research Assistant Responsibilities

Undergraduate research assistants (RAs) play a crucial role in supporting the research endeavors within the department. Their responsibilities vary depending on the specific lab and project but often include:

Direct participation in the experimental process, including participant interaction through the active recruitment, screening, and scheduling of research participants (e.g., parents and children), and running experiments while strictly adhering to established protocols.
Contributing to project logistics by designing and making research stimuli.
Managing data through systematic coding of videotapes or other observations.
Assisting with analyzing data.
Maintaining the integrity of datasets.
Attending mandatory weekly meetings to discuss research progress and collaborate with the lab group.
Helping to set up experimental tasks and test participants through the SONA system.
Coding and analyzing data.
Literature reviews, study design, stimuli creation, archival data analysis, and statistical coding.
Finding research articles with specific data structures or from specific domains.
Conducting data analysis to demonstrate novel statistical methods or using specific tools.
Quality testing of newly developed statistical tools in SPSS, SAS, or R.
Literature searches and coding of academic papers to describe how they use certain statistical methods.
Searching for useful or interesting datasets to be used in analysis.
Helping with data collection by running participants through experiments and will help pilot-test those experiments.

Expectations for Research Assistants

To ensure the continuity and benefit of training, RAs are often required to maintain a minimum commitment to the lab's work for at least a specified number of hours per week and consecutive quarters. The most important qualifications are an eagerness to learn, interest in quantitative psychology, and confidence in your analytical and mathematical skills. A commitment of at least two quarters is expected. By joining the Rational Altruism Lab, you will benefit from working with a team of skilled and passionate researchers.

Faculty Research Interests

The UCLA Psychology Department boasts a distinguished faculty whose research spans a wide range of topics within psychology. Their diverse interests and expertise contribute to the department's vibrant intellectual atmosphere and provide students with opportunities to engage in cutting-edge research across various subfields.

Examples of faculty research areas include:

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How do different parts of the mind/brain work together such that language "means something"? What mental structures constitute these meanings?
How do we remember and why do we forget, and how does this change across the lifespan? How does emotion modulate memory? How is emotional memory altered in depression and aging? Can we rescue memory impairment using interventions such as music, emotion regulation, etc.? How do individual differences play a role in what we remember (e.g.
Why do our social relationships have such a profound impact on our emotional and physical health? How do humans maximize the benefits + minimize the costs of our social worlds? What is the design of friendship psychology?
How do we perceive rhythm, melody, and emotion in music?
What is the neurobiological basis of atypical sensory processing across neurodevelopmental and clinical conditions?
How does culture affect human development? How do sex differences in brain and behavior develop? How do traditional and newer media impact the social behavior of preadolescent and adolescents? How does culture and other factors affect care-seeking, assessment, diagnosis, and treatment adherence in ethnically diverse individuals with neuromedical illnesses?
How do language users incorporate different sources of information to produce sufficiently rich representations?
How does the brain compute past experience, or reward history, to contribute to decision making at the present time?
How do we form first impressions of other people from only a glimpse of their face or body?
How do school contextual factors (e.g., ethnic composition, organizational structure) affect peer relationships and student well-being?
What can neuroimaging tell us about differences in brain structure and function in individuals with schizophrenia? Neuroimaging Predictors of Post-Stroke Epilepsy: Quantitative MRIs and EEG Analysis Faculty Sponsor: Dr.
How do synaptic changes result in learning, as studied in an invertebrate?
Why does the world look the way it is, and with many visual illusions? What are the computational mechanisms underlying human perception and reasoning? (i) How does consciousness emerge from neural activity?
How do our brains track and encode information about the structure of our social networks? How does social network position impact cognition and behavior?
Why do we remember some events vividly, while others fade or change over time?
What creates the psychological commitment to persist in developing one's talent?
What makes for healthy pregnancy, birth and offspring?
How does interaction between the senses affect how we perceive the world, ourselves, and how we learn?
How does early adversity impact neurodevelopment?
How do people learn things that are hard to learn? Things that are learned over weeks, months, or years?
What misconceptions and misperceptions do they have? What does this tell us about people’s understanding of data and statistics? We will explore these questions using mixed-methods.
Can statistics for structural equations be improved? Are model-based reliability coefficients better? Can new Guttman scaling rival Rasch or 2PL IRT?
How do we account for dependencies in data when exploring questions of how, when, and their combination? Can repeated-measures designs assist in reducing reproducibility issues?

Specific Faculty and Their Research

Patrick Wilson: A Professor in the Department of Psychology at UCLA. Dr. Wilson is a community and health psychologist and directs the SPHERE Lab at UCLA. His work broadly examines the psychological, social, and cultural factors that shape individual and community-level health outcomes.
Robert Bilder, Ph.D.: Faculty Sponsor of National Neuropsychology Network.

Faculty Recognition

The Department's faculty have recently received the following awards:

Congratulations to Assistant Professor Yi Feng for receiving the Outstanding Dissertation Award from Division D of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).
Congratulations to Assistant Professor Dave Clewett for being named a 2026 Sloan Research Fellow in Neuroscience by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Health Psychology Faculty and Students

Many faculty and students in the Health Psychology program focus on health equity among historically marginalized communities. Their work examines how psychosocial stressors such as discrimination, stigma, and minority stress influence mental health, substance use, and physical health outcomes.

Examples of faculty and student research interests within the Health Psychology program include:

Sociocultural factors that influence mental health outcomes and service use.
The implementation of culturally-adapted digital mental health tools targeting racial and ethnic minority youth.
How identity, stigma, and discrimination intersect to differentially affect health outcomes among minority individuals.
How these forces affect the health and well-being of sexual and gender minorities who also identify as racial/ethnic minorities.
How socioeconomic stressors, stigma, and discrimination influence disparities in body image, disordered eating, and related health outcomes.
How discrimination influences psychophysiological health outcomes among Black women.
Racial disparities in the burden of loss and grief over the lifetime, as well as the collective grieving practices that communities of color engage in to tend to loss through a healing justice framework.
Socioeconomic-based health disparities.
How social class stigma negatively impacts health.
Race, racial discrimination and sociocultural factors affecting Black women’s health, particularly maternal and reproductive health.
How structural and social factors shape mental and physical health outcomes.

Biopsychosocial Science of Health

The UCLA Department of Psychology seeks to hire a tenure-track Assistant Professor or tenured early Associate Professor in the Biopsychosocial Science of Health. We are interested in applicants who are pursuing innovative and collaborative biopsychosocial research on the dynamic interactions among psychological, social, behavioral, and biological factors, and their impact on health and disease. Example topic areas include health across the lifespan, and widely accessible approaches to prevention and intervention. Potential affiliations within the Department of Psychology include health, clinical, social, developmental, and other areas.

A Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion

The UCLA Psychology Department demonstrates its commitment to diversity and inclusion by encouraging applications from individuals with scholarship regarding these topics in underrepresented groups or with a history of and commitment to mentoring students from underrepresented groups in the sciences. The University of California is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, age or protected veteran status. UCLA has programs to assist in partner employment, childcare, schooling and other family concerns.

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