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Monisha Pasupathi, Ph.D.
Associate Professor - Developmental Area
Department of Psychology | The University of Utah Curriculum Vita 
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Contact Information
Monisha Pasupathi
Department of Psychology
University of Utah
380 South 1530 East, Room 502
Salt Lake City, Utah 84112 -0251
Webpage: www.psych.utah.edu/monishapasupathi
Office: 625 Social & Behavior Sciences Tower
Phone: (801) 585-9175
Email: monisha.pasupathi@psych.utah.edu
Department Fax: (801) 581-5841
Research Interests
I study the development of self, identity, and memory, and I'm especially interested in how children and adults integrate experiences within their sense of self. Current projects in the Social Development Laboratory (jointly supervised by Drs. Pasupathi and Wainryb) include studies addressing the following questions:
-How do children make sense of experiences in which they did or did not forgive a peer who upset them?
-How do mothers and children talk about children's disagreements with siblings and friends?
-How do teenagers and their mothers communicate about adolescents’ identities?
-How do teenagers develop autonomy in the context of relationships with mothers, fathers, and friends?
Opportunities For Students
We are currently seeking volunteer research assistants to help with all of our projects. Depending on individual interests and experience, volunteers may be involved in recruiting participants, assisting with interviews, transcribing audio files, data entry, and data coding.
If you are interested in being a part of our research team, please send an email to Holly.Recchia@psych.utah.edu and tell us a bit about yourself. Including a copy of your transcript and academic/employment references would also be helpful.
Education
| Post Doctoral Fellowship | Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Centerfor Lifespan Psychology (1997 - 1999) |
| Ph.D. | Stanford University (Psychology, 1997) |
| B.A | Case Western Reserve University (Psychology and English, 1991) |
Research Interests and Current Projects
I study the development of self, identity, and memory, and I'm especially interested in how children and adults integrate experiences within their sense of self.
Hearing and telling stories is one of the human endeavors that span both our ancient and present cultures, from the hunting narrative implied by cave art to the latest Tim Burton film. Despite the advent of sophisticated technology (i.e., internet blogs) and entire economies (Hollywood in the U.S. and Bollywood in India, for example) founded primarily around modern practices for storytelling, we continue to also tell stories in the 'old' ways - in words, face-to-face, among intimates. I believe that these 'old' ways of telling stories create our selves and our relations with others. Moreover, they do so in collaboration, both positive and negative, with family and friends.
My recent theoretical and empirical work has focused on relations between storytelling and self, whether traditionally conceptualized in terms of self-concept ( McLean, Pasupathi, & Pals, in press; Pasupathi, Alderman, & Shaw, 2007; Pasupathi & Rich, 2005), or viewed in terms of the integration of experiences with the self (Pasupathi, Mansour, & Brubaker, in press; Pasupathi & Mansour, 2006). For example, people typically use stories to confirm their views of themselves (Pasupathi & Rich, 2005), but some experiences force people to create stories that account for changes and discontinuities (Pasupathi & Mansour, 2006).
The process of integration is constrained by the capacities that people of different ages bring to bear on it. Very young children lack the psychological understanding (theory-of-mind and related abilities) to connect experiences with a sense of self in a coherent way, and only during adolescence do identity-creating capacities allow integration with a more long-term sense of self. Those same identity-creating capacities may continue to develop into middle-age, as people come to possess a more enduring grasp of themselves and their lifetime experiences (Pasupathi & Mansour, 2006). The integration process is perhaps most evident when people use it to create continuity in the face of experiences that violate their sense of self-continuity.
Such violations occur in many forms, but doing harm is one of the most potentially consequential, both for individuals and for societies. My most recent interest has been in focusing especially on how people integrate experiences that involve violations of justice and concern for others, experiences in which they bear some culpability. Integrating these experiences within the self is a key for the development of moral selfhood, and it is not easy for people to do (see Cecilia Wainryb homepage).
It becomes particularly difficult to do this for experiences that are traumatic, involve extreme violence, and collective disruption. This is the case for children involved in communal and community violence - child soldiers, displaced children, and children in violent communities (Wainryb & Pasupathi, 2007a; 2007b).
People do not integrate experiences in a vacuum. The process of creating stories to integrate experiences is intrinsically social, and much of my past and present interest focuses on the role that listeners play in that process (Pasupathi, 2001). Some of my findings in this area involve experimental manipulation of how listeners respond to stories. For example, people who tell stories to distracted listeners employ less interpretive, psychological language that connects a series of events with their own subjectivity (Pasupathi & Hoyt, under review). They also, relatedly, come to perceive the event they talked about as less consistent with their sense of self (Pasupathi & Rich, 2005; Thoman, Sansone, & Pasupathi, in press).
Most recently, I am beginning to look at how children and adults tell stories about moral transgressions to their parents and their peers (see Cecilia Wainryb homepage ). Parents and peers are listeners with different agendas concerning the storyteller's developing moral self, and are likely to help with integrating that event in distinctive ways.
Stories, selves, and morality are also bound up within the context of cultures. Cultures provide different frameworks for the interpretation of experience, and individuals, together with their listeners, choose, reject, accept, and alter those frameworks. In some ongoing work, I am interested in understanding what those frameworks are - particularly those relating to collective memory, how individuals engage in negotiation with them, and how the frameworks themselves emerge out of individual's discursive practices (Wainryb & Pasupathi, 2007b).
Links to Assorted Mentors, Collaborators & Like-Minded Souls
Dan McAdams
Robyn Fivush
Jack Bauer
Jen Pals
Kate McLean
Avril Thorne
Susan Bluck
Nicole Alea
Laura King
Ursula Staudinger
Laura Carstensen
Paul Baltes
Jefferson Singer
Susan Charles
Mara Mather
William Hirst
Neal Norrick
Cecilia Wainryb
About Me
I have a family and I like some hiking, snowshoeing and skiing (cross-country more than downhill, but I've been known to do both), and some river trips. I'm also an obsessive cook and reader of trashy and not-so-trashy science fiction.
Research Areas
Developmental, Diversity, Clinical-Developmental, Interpersonal Process
My Graduate Students
Vladimir Morar
Nick O'Donnell
Trisha Weeks
