Current PWB Lab Members
Paige Guge
Paige Guge is the current lab manager of the PWB lab as well as a second year Master's student in the Social Personalty and Affective Sciences program. She obtained her Bachelor's degree in psychology from South Dakota State University in 2017. Her research predominately focuses on investigating how consumer behavior and decision making impacts outcomes related to health and happiness. Paige hopes to continue her research in a Ph.D. program in 2019.
Mirae Bouyssou
Mirae Bouyssou is a second year graduate student in the Social, Personality, and Affective Science M.A. concentration. She is interested in studying stereotypes and stigmatization, particularly regarding gender and sexuality. Specifically, she is interested in the ways in which implicit and explicit biases may manifest though social distancing and interpersonal behaviors, as well as gender backlash.
Ishaa Chaukulkar
Ishaa is a second year international student in the Mind, Brain, Behavior M.A program. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from San Francisco State University in 2017. Ishaa’s research interests are in personality traits, emotion regualtion, and happiness. Specifically, she is investigating the how extraverts are happier than introverts. She is also interested in understanding consumer behavior and expereintialism. Ishaa worked as an undergraduate RA in the PWB lab, and is passionate about teaching, statistics, and statistics related memes! Aside from research, she enjoys traveling, cooking and other experiential consumptions!
Alyssa Hegenbart
Alyssa Hegenbart is a first year graduate student in the Social, Personality, and Affective sciences M.A. program. She graduated from the University of California, Davis in 2017 with a Bachelor's degree in psychology. She is interested in studying personality, motivated social behavior, and personality's effects on important financial decision making.
Ryan Mette
Ryan Mette is a first-year student in the Social Personality and Affective Sciences (SPA) M.A. program. He is currently working on how purchasing affects happiness. Particularly, how one's hedonism adapts to a type of purchase.
Andrew Kitchner
Andrew is a first-year student in the Mind, Brain, and Behavior MA program. He earned his Bachelors degree in Economics from UC Santa Barbara, conducted research with the Deputy Dean of Sciences at the University of Auckland, and spent three years working at one of the world’s largest investment firms. His desire to pursue psychology has been fueled by his exposure to experiential and behavioral economics, as well as the works of Robin Hanson, Jordan Peterson, and Sam Harris. His interests stem from his belief that in order to continuously improve the quality of human life, we must continuously strive to improve the quality of our understanding of humanity itself.
PWB Alumni
Matthew Bernas
Matthew Bernas is a post-baccalaureate researcher in Dr. Ryan Howell’s Personality and Well-Being Lab at San Francisco State University, where he first joined the lab in the Spring of 2017. Driven by an interest in both positive and clinical psychology, he manages the Purchasing Behavior and Happiness study while working on his own honors thesis, The Quest to Assign the Right Amount of Happiness Homework. Having volunteered for the Crisis Text Line and getting mental health first aid certified, he hopes to get more clinical experience in a queer-space/support underfunded communities during his gap year before applying for graduate programs. In the future, he hopes to work as a therapist who teaches part-time.
Remy Cockerill, M.A.
Remy Cockerill earned her Bachelors degree in psychology from California State University of Long Beach. Throughout her undergraduate career, she worked with low-income children and their mothers studying wellness interventions such as; stress management, mindfulness, and exercise. She also volunteered with underprivileged female youth in the Anaheim school district teaching a peer-pressure and body positivity after-school elective. Finally she, along with 5 others, started a non-profit organization called Mas Fuerte aimed at mitigating adverse effects of environmental and institutional racism/classism within Orange County- a nonprofit still active today.
As a graduate student at SF state she studied behavioral manifestations of happiness and well-being. Remy plans to continue researching wellness interventions at the graduate level - specifically in underserved populations and within family dynamics.
Karynna Okabe-Miyamoto, M.A.
Karynna Okabe-Miyamoto graduated in 2018 from the PWB Lab with her M.A. in Psychology with a concentration in Mind, Brain, and Behavior. She was also the lab coordinator for the 2017/2018 academic year. Her thesis tested the robustness of the experiential advantage by utilizing a multi-method assessment of the outcome of happiness.
Karynna is currently a Ph.D. student in Psychology working with Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky at the University of California, Riverside. She is also interning at Zenzi, a values marketing agency.
Caitlin Collins, M.A.
Caitlin Collins graduated in 2017 with a M.A. in Developmental Psychology. She is interested in happiness, and spending behavior. Her thesis examined how materialist spenders, as compared to their experiential counterparts, are perceived by others. The study found materialistic spenders were imbued with negative personality traits which influenced their perceived value as an employee.
Ngoc-Han Nguyen, M.A.
Ngoc-Han Nguyen graduated with her M.A. in Psychology with a concentration in Mind, Brain, and Behavior in 2017. Ngoc-Han's thesis focused on different mediators of the experiential advantage, including identity, relatedness, and hedonic adaptation.
Ngoc-Han currently works as an Educational Research Analyst for the Santa Ana Unified School District. There, she utilizes her analytic, survey design, and program evaluation skills on the Research and Evaluation team to ultimately improve the institution of education for ethnic minorities and low income families. The mission of the team is to empower educators by transforming the use of data to accelerate student success towards college and career readiness.
Danrae Sabbaluca
Danrae Sabbaluca, or Drae, is a casual pro-gamer who completed his B.A. in Psychology, in Research. Under Dr. Howell’s supervision, he successfully defended his Honor’s Thesis: Improving Positive Activity Interventions Using Video Game Elements.
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Currently, Drae is a market-research intern at Zenzi, a values-based marketing company.
Chris Sanders, M.A.
Chris graduated from PWB lab and SFSU with a Master's in Mind, Brain, & Behavior in the Spring of 2017. His thesis took a novel approach to interpreting the longitudinal well-being impact of online happiness-boosting interventions, finding that these effects are mostly driven by a large-scale recovery from depression symptoms in highly-depressed people rather than a mild upward shift in well-being across participants. His other work involves lay theories of meaning in life and other positive psychology topics, the commodification of happiness research, and the micro-economic link between money and happiness.
After leaving PWB lab, Chris began working on his doctorate in Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri, Columbia under the advisement of Laura King.
Pooya Razavi, M.A.
Pooya Razavi is currently a PhD student at the University of Oregon, working with Dr. Sanjay Srivastava. While working on his M.A. at SFSU, he was part of an international collaboration researching the cross-cultural similarities and differences in the experience of awe (see the resulting paper here). In his current research, Pooya studies emotions, culture, and social media using a multi-method approach.
JiaWei Zhang, Ph.D.
JiaWei Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at The University of Memphis. His research focuses on emotions – especially the psychosocial ramification of awe and gratitude, emotion regulation strategy (e.g., self-compassion) upon coping with difficult life events (e.g., breakup, regrets, imperfections), money, time perspective and aging, nature and prosocial behaviors, social hierarchy (status, class, power), as well as consumption (e.g., experiential purchases) and happiness. You can find out more about him and his research here.
Grant Donnelly, Ph.D.
Grant Donnelly received a MA is Psychological Research: Mind, Brain and Behavior under the supervision of Dr. Ryan Howell in 2013. He attended Harvard Business School from 2013-2018 and received a Ph.D. in Marketing. Grant is an incoming Assistant Professor in Marketing and Logistics at The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business. Grant designs interventions to improve consumer welfare and his research has evaluated financial decision-making, physical health and prosocial behavior.
Masha Ksendzova
Masha Ksendzova graduated with a B.A. in Psychology in 2015. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Marketing at Boston University, studying consumer judgment and decision-making.