Professor Jennifer Lerner and Professor Yuval Feldman's research project on Emotion and Legal Reasoning consists of literature review, assistance in preparing submissions to IRB, support in development of experimental design, running experiments at the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory, and data analysis.

The project is a longitudinal study of state legislative responses to demographic change. In particular we are interested in the relationship between growth in a state's minority population and efforts to restrict voting rights. Our empirical scope includes legislative efforts in every U.S. state, from 2000-2012 .  The scholar is responsible for collecting and coding data on state legislative activity regarding voting rights.  We are trying to determine to what extent state efforts to restrict voting rights--e.g.

We conduct research investigating the cognitive and neural basis of episodic memory ¬— the ability to remember events from the personal past — and processes leading to memory distortions. We utilize cognitive and behavioral testing as well as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in healthy younger and older volunteers and individuals with clinical conditions known to affect memory processes, such as Alzheimer’s disease.

The SCAN lab studies how humans understand the thoughts, feelings and mental states of other people. We employ both functional neuroimaging (fMRI) and behavioral methods to study the neural correlates and processes of social cognition.

This research project consists of prosopographical, social network, and spatial analysis.  We are in interested in how Chinese social and political elites interact from the 7th through the 19th century.  Students are responsible for research on items (such as historical placenames) used for coding data, some database management, research on historical bureaucratic titles.  A reading knowledge of Chinese is required.

We plan to create a corpus of spontaneous speech in Tsez, an endangered language of the Caucasus spoken by about 6,000 people, and three endangered Mayan languages. The project will involve collecting, transcribing and annotating the data in such a way that they could be used by other researchers. We will then compare these languages to spoken production from several heritage languages (Russian, Chinese, Avar, Spanish, and Mam) whose corpora will also be transcribed and annotated.

This project comprises the compilation of the most extensive database of British legislative records ever built.  We have already acquired every speech made in the British House of Commons after 1803, and are soon to acquire every roll call undertaken between 1832 and 1900.  Our research focuses on when and how party discipline emerged in the British House of Commons.  Primary responsibility of the student is  to 'clean up' of roll call records, which list member of parliament nam

This research project is a continuing project of the stylometric analysis of Phillip Wright's Appendix B from his book, "The Tariff on Animal and Vegetable Oils", which outlined the method of instrumental variable regression. A number of letters between Phillip and Sewall Wright contain the development of IV regression. This project requires deciphering the statistical work in their letters.

In 2002, in collaboration with the International Rescue Committee, Dr. Betancourt, director of the FXB Center’s Research Program on Children and Global Adversity began a prospective longitudinal study (LWSAY) on children associated with armed conflict and armed groups (CAAFAG) in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Follow-up data were collected in 2003/2004 and 2008. The sample includes former child soldiers and other war-affected youth.

Over the past two years, Afsaneh Najmabadi has developed a digital archive and website that preserves, links, and renders accessible primary source materials related to the social and cultural history of women’s worlds during the reign of the Qajar dynasty (1796 – 1925) in Iran. Over the next period, the project will be focused on is the development and launch of two new features: an interactive research platform and an interactive genealogy and geography feature.

This research involves laboratory experiments that expose subjects to stimuli that simulate racial segregation and measures their response. The student researcher is responsible for working directly with the program director to help create stimuli using Photoshop or other design software.

Why do states vary in their approaches towards the regulation of immigration?  In this research project, we will map and explain cross-national variation in the way receiving states attempt to regulate immigration flows in contemporary times. Using statistical and qualitative case analysis, we plant to consider a range of explanatory factors including (a) interest groups; (b) partisan politics; (c) market factors and (d) legal and political institutions.

Are there different reasons that compel individuals to migrate from Mexico to the United States in different periods? How does the economic and political context in both countries influence who comes?  To answer these questions, quantitative and qualitative data analysis methods will be used in this project led by Filiz Garip.

Professor Daniel Gilbert is an experimental social psychologist whose methods run from large-scale survey research (Killingsworth & Gilbert, 2010) to brain imaging (Mitchell, Schirmer, Ames, & Gilbert, 2010), but that generally focus on laboratory-based studies of human behavior. Gilbert's primary research focus over the last 15 years has been on the errors people make when attempting to predict their emotional reactions to future events.