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Larry Sanna

  • Media Contact

Dr. Sanna's expertise is in social cognition, judgment, and decision making, particularly how people's thoughts and feelings can both bias and debias decisions. This includes counterfactual thinking; metacognition; cooperation and prosocial behaviors; and judgments over time, such as forecasting, planning, and hindsight; with the ultimate goal of helping people to make better decisions. See Dr. Sanna's home page for more detail.

Primary Interests:

  • Group Processes
  • Helping, Prosocial Behavior
  • Judgment and Decision Making
  • Social Cognition
  • Group Processes
  • Helping, Prosocial Behavior
  • Judgment and Decision Making
  • Social Cognition

Research Group or Laboratory:

Books:

Journal Articles:

  • Carter, S. E., & Sanna, L. J. (2008). It’s not just what you say but when you say it: Self-presentation and temporal construal. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 1339-1345.
  • Chang, E. C., Asakawa, K., & Sanna, L. J. (2001). Cultural variations in optimistic and pessimistic bias: Do Easterners really expect the worst and Westerners really expect the best when predicting future life events? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 476-491.
  • Chang, E. C., Sanna, L. J., Hirsch, J. K., & Jeglic, E. J. (2010). Loneliness and negative life events as predictors of hopelessness and suicidal behaviors in Hispanics: Evidence for a diathesis-stress model. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 66, 1242-1253.
  • Parks, C. D., Sanna, L. J., & Berel, S. R. (2001). Actions of similar others as inducements to cooperate in social dilemmas. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 345-354.
  • Parks, C. D., Sanna, L. J., & Posey, D. C. (2003). Retrospection in social dilemmas: How thinking about the past affects future cooperation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 988-996.
  • Penn, D. L., Sanna, L. J., & Roberts, D. L. (2008). Social cognition in schizophrenia: An overview. Schizophrenia Bulletin, 34, 408-411.
  • Sanna, L. J. (1999). Mental simulations, affect, and subjective confidence: Timing is everything. Psychological Science, 10, 339-345.
  • Sanna, L. J. (1996). Defensive pessimism, optimism, and simulating alternatives: Some ups and downs of prefactual and counterfactual thinking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 1020-1036.
  • Sanna, L. J., Chang, E. C., Miceli, P. M., & Lundberg, K. B. (2011). Rising up to higher virtues: Experiencing elevated physical height uplifts prosocial actions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47, 471-476.
  • Sanna, L. J., Chang, E. C., Parks, C. D., & Kennedy, L. A. (2009). Construing collective concerns: Increasing cooperation by broadening construals in social dilemmas. Psychological Science, 20, 1319-1321.
  • Sanna, L. J., Schwarz, N., & Stocker, S. L. (2002). When debiasing backfires: Accessible content and accessibility experiences in debiasing hindsight. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 28, 497-502.
  • Sanna, L. J., Turley-Ames, K. J., & Meier, S. (1999). Mood, self-esteem, and simulated alternatives: Thought-provoking affective influences on counterfactual direction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 543-558.
  • Schwarz, N., Sanna, L. J., Skurnik, I., & Yoon, C. (2007). Metacognitive experiences and the intricacies of setting people straight: Implications for debiasing and public information campaigns. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 127-161.
  • Tsai, W., Chang, E. C., Sanna, L. J., & Herringshaw, A. J. (2011). An examination of happiness as a buffer of the rumination-adjustment link: Ethnic differences between European and Asian American students. Asian American Journal of Psychology, 2, 168-180.

Larry Sanna
Department of Psychology
University of Michigan
530 Church Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1043
United States

Phone: (734) 763-1133
Fax: (734) 764-3520

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