PEOPLE

Luke is the director of the Personality Processes Lab and has a wide range of interests in personality psychology. He completed his PhD at the University of Queensland, postdoctoral research at the University of London, and came to the University of Melbourne in 2011. Some recent themes in his research include (a) the biological bases of personality, (b) links that personality traits have with emotion and wellbeing, and (c) how our personality influences prosocial and moral behaviour. Outside academia his interests revolve around yoga, books, bikes, travel, music, and sleeping.

Luiza comes from a background in Biology and Neuroscience, and during her PhD she intends to uncover biological mechanisms that underlies individual differences in prosocial personality. She is particularly interested in studying how EEG neural indexes of empathic concern, moral thinking and reward processing might be related to Altruistic tendencies and Enlightened Compassion. The methodologies she will be using includes Event Related Potentials (ERP), time-frequency analysis and machine learning (MVPA). Her PhD is in collaboration with Dr Stefan Bode (University of Melbourne). Outside of the lab, Luiza spends most of her time reading books, singing, cooking and enjoying nature.

Yana’s PhD focuses on investigating which personality traits predispose individuals to seek out well-being practices. In particular, how these traits may moderate an individual’s response to a well-being intervention and shape one’s experience of a well-being practice, with a particular focus on meditation. Her PhD is in collaboration with Dr. Nicholas Van Dam (The University of Melbourne). More broadly, her interest in personality stems from wanting to know how and why people differ in the way they choose to live their lives and pursue happiness. Outside the lab, Yana enjoys being in nature and collecting (and subsequently abandoning) hobbies.  

Ally is an incoming PhD student whose (still-developing) PhD is likely to focus on uncovering whether behavioural measures and self-report questionnaires of reward sensitivity relate to facets of the Big Five. In her honours thesis, she examined the extent to which the Big Five could act as an organising framework for scales of reinforcement sensitivity. Outside of the lab, Ally likes to cook, read, travel, and spend quality time with her family, friends, and three cats. 

Helena is a PhD student in the Decision, Risk and Financial Sciences Program. While Helena's academic and professional background is in economics, she has always been very interested in personality psychology. During her PhD, Helena will aim to bring ideas from both of these disciplines and research how people strategically use personality expressions to change the beliefs and decisions of others. In her spare time, Helena loves going to live music shows, picking up different hobbies, and bingeing the latest TV shows

Rhys is interested in how personality affects people's decisions to benefit themselves or benefit others. Broad personality factors like Agreeableness, Honesty-Humility, and the Dark Factor of Personality can influence these decisions. Rhys's PhD will focus on identifying the narrow facet-level traits which are shared or distinct between these factors, and then explore how these facets influence social decisions in experimental games. Outside the lab, Rhys spends his time at concerts, playing music, and reading/watching dystopian books and movies.