I am a Senior Lecture in the Department of Behavioural Sciences at Zefat Academic College, and have been an integral member of its core faculty since its establishment. I earned my Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from University of Haifa. My academic training began with a focus on traditional cognitive psychology, which I have since utilized to explore issues of societal significance. Building upon my basic interest in visual attention and symbol representation, I now research various phenomena in social
cognition. My recent publications have explored information processing in social and developmental contexts, as well as embodied cognition and media psychology. Currently, I am actively engaged in multiple collaborative projects with colleagues from institutions such as Belfast Queen’s University, University College Dublin, University of Haifa and University of South Australia, I plan to continue my research endeavours with a focus on the following topics: role of visual attention in the context of social stimuli, applying embodied cognition theory to understand engagement with media narratives, exploring how media character authenticity, including personal relevance and genuine emotion, influences audience identification and persuasion, and investigating how aligning sensory experiences of media characters with those of the audience impacts message evaluation and perceived truthfulness.
I am a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Psychology Track in the Department of Behavioral Sciences at Zefat Academic College. I am interested in behaviours and attitudes in multicultural contexts, with a focus on cross cultural research. I study people’s reasoning about conflict-related groups and its implications for intergroup relations and prosocial behaviour. Additionally, my research explores how children navigate their social worlds and how social and cultural contexts shape their thinking about others. I am a member of the Helping Kids! International Project, which examines children’s empathy and prosocial behaviour across five settings: Northern Ireland, Macedonia, Kosovo, and Israel. At the beginning of my career, I was a founding member of the Program for Secular and Religious Dialogue at Bar-Ilan University, which aims to reduce prejudices between Jewish sub-groups. I contributed to developing an intergroup dialogue intervention for students from Jewish-Israeli subgroups. At Zefat Academic College, I applied these methods to foster dialogue between Jewish and Arab students, promoting ethnic-religious tolerance and multiculturalism. I have the desire to make academic education accessible to the weaker populations in Israeli society, both Jews and Arabs, and I intend to continue to specialize in developing teaching programs to diverse populations. My long-term goal is to contribute to debates on both unique and universal process in the development of social cognition and intergroup relations.
