Dr. Ayse Payir (PhD, 2015) is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Boston University (BU) School of Education.
She is working with Drs. Kathleen Corriveau (BU) and Paul Harris (Harvard) on a project that examines children’s ideas about religion and science cross-culturally. The research team aims to conduct experiments that test the cognitive similarities and differences in these conceptualizations and how children’s upbringing- secular vs. religious – affects them.
Ayse earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at UNCG in 2015 under the direction of Dr. Robert Guttentag. The title of her dissertation was “Who Is to Blame, Who Is to Credit? Counterfactual Thinking and Children’s Judgments of Emotions and Social Attributions.” Ayse’s research program is aimed at understanding counterfactual (i.e., “What-if”) thinking in relation to children’s conceptions of what is possible and impossible. She has published her research in several prestigious academic journals, including the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, Journal of Family Theory and Review, and Young Consumers.
