Jocelyn (Yachen) Xie

Research Focus

Jocelyn (Yachen) Xie is a PhD student in the Department of Communication at UC Davis. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Psychology and Communication from The Ohio State University, graduating magna cum laude with Distinction in Research in Psychology. While at OSU, she worked with Dr. Dylan Wagner on moral character and mental representation using the reverse correlation technique, and with Dr. Brittany Shoots-Reinhard on decision-making and traffic behaviors. Jocelyn is broadly interested in cognition, neuroscience, and media narratives, especially in how moral judgment and decision-making affect people’s preferences and evaluations of media content and characters. She researches these processes using Affective Disposition Theory (ADT) and computational as well as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques.