Congratulations for reaching the end of the school year!! Cheers to all of our collaborators, students, and friends. We wish everyone a fun and relaxing summer ahead ⋆｡°✩
Duke Chapel tower climb with Hope Bass Connections & Science of Happiness course students.
Stay tuned for more BABLab research on hope, compassion, and virtual worship in the year to come!
Happy (almost) end of the Spring semester!
Over the course of the year, our What is Hope? Bass Connections 24-25 Project Team has reviewed hope literature, recruited community populations, conducted semi-structured interviews, and analyzed stories of hope. Last week, the team presented a poster at the 2025 Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase on some of our preliminary findings from this work investigating the lived experiences of hope!
As the Spring semester wraps up, we are proud to have two of our BABLab undergraduate RAs — Abby and Rohan — presenting their posters at the 2025 Duke URS Undergraduate Research Symposium!
Abby Li, presenting her poster on virtual worship and flourishing.
Rohan Gupta, presenting his poster on perceptions of compassion between Christians and Buddhists.
BABLab Team at Duke URS 2025!
April showers bring May flowers! We are celebrating more good news in the midst of this rainy weather. Last month, our two BABLab post-doctoral fellows Dr. Kunalan Manokara and Dr. Megan Edwards attended and presented at the 2025 SAS Annual Conference in Portland!
Dr. Kunalan Manokara presenting his research on Empathy (left) and Emotion Stereotypes (right) at the Annual Conference.
Dr. Megan Edwards presenting her research on Awe (left) at the Positive Emotions Preconference, which was Co-Organized by Dr. Kunalan Manokara this year (right).
Happy Spring! With new blossoms emerging at the turn of the season, we’d like to celebrate our BABLab members in this season of growth.
Last month, BABLab attended the 2025 SPSP Annual Convention in Denver, featuring: data blitz talk by post-doctoral fellow Dr. Megan Edwards, and an array of poster presentations by lab managers Jenna Faith McClear, Cheryl Tan, and senior undergraduate RA Rohan Gupta!
Dr. Megan Edwards at the Existential Psychology Pre-Conference
Cheryl Tan, Rohan Gupta at the Emotion Pre-Conference
Jenna Faith McClear at the Religion & Spirituality Pre-Conference
The BABLab Team at SPSP 2025!
Happy New Year & Happy Lunar New Year! We are welcoming the Spring 2025 semester with exciting new publications on emotion from our BABLab members.
Dr. Megan Edwards, BABLab post-doctoral fellow, recently celebrated two publications on hope and awe, currently in-press at Emotion and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin respectively.
Cheryl Tan, BABLab co-lab manager, celebrated a paper on joy last summer, currently published online at The Journal of Positive Psychology.
We look forward to sharing more of the work that our BABLab members have been working hard on!
Happy Fall! BABLab enjoyed one of the first cool days of the season with a rooftop lunch — blue skies and a lovely breeze! A great start to the semester with our new BABLab team members, Megan Edwards and Jenna McClear, and a visit from collaborator Ward Davis (Wheaton College).
With Fall soon approaching, we’d like to welcome two new members to the BABLab team! Our ranks are joined by two post-doctoral fellows, Megan Edwards and Kunalan Manokara. Together, we’re excited to continue the lab’s work on empathy, as well as begin new projects on hope and virtual worship!
This Summer, we mentored two rising sophomores from the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF)! Over the eight week program, Rachel and Jasmine worked on the BABLab’s latest study on compassion — from literature review, survey creation, to data cleaning and results presentation. In culmination of their time in the lab, both RAs created and presented individual posters at the Duke Summer Research Showcase last Friday.
Congratulations to Jasmine (left) and Rachel (right) on their first research poster presentation!
Congratulations to one of our senior RAs, Cai, who completed her thesis defense! Cai will be graduating with Distinction in Psychology in May 2024.
