Our Team
Current Members
Manos Tsakiris
Director
Manos Tsakiris is Professor of Psychology at the Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London where he leads the Lab of Action & Body and the INtheSELF ERC-funded project. He also led the BIAS (Body & Image in Arts & Science, 20216-2021) project, funded by the NOMIS Foundation, at the Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, University of London. His research is highly interdisciplinary and focuses on how bodily and feeling states influence our self-awareness and socio-political behaviour.
Mariana von Mohr
Postdoctoral Fellow in Social Neuroscience
Mariana is an experimental psychologist and affective neuroscientist. Her research focuses on how visceral feelings and emotions shape social cognition, including first impressions, self-other distinction, social influence and decision-making in social settings. To investigate this, she employs behavioral, physiological and neuroimaging techniques. She holds an MSc in Developmental Neuroscience and Psychopathology from University College London (UCL) and Yale University, and a PhD in Social Cognitive Neuroscience from University College London (UCL) – funded by CONACyT. At the Centre, Mariana’s research will focus on how emotions and their underlying neurophysiological mechanisms shape political behaviour.
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You can visit Mariana’s website here & you can get in touch with Mariana here
Andrea Vik
Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science
Andrea investigates how psychological constructs, emotions, and affect shape political attitudes and behavior, as well as how political communication both influences and leverages these affective dimensions. Methodologically, she specializes in quantitative and experimental approaches. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and an MSc in Communication Science from the University of Amsterdam. Her research lies at the intersection of political psychology, political communication, and political representation. She is also an open science enthusiast and cares greatly about transparency, reproducibility, and integrity in research practices.You can read more about Andrea on her website: https://andreavik.carrd.co/
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Jesse Mehravar
Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science
Jesse explores the political implications of emotions and national identity, particularly in assessing limits and prospects of expanded ingroup boundaries. His work with the Body Politics Lab alongside other collaborators focuses on how people and their physical bodies relate to the political world and to one another, with particular emphasis on political ideology and intergroup relations. Jesse completed his MA in Political Science at the University of Western Ontario and is defending his PhD in Political Science at Western with his dissertation focused on unpacking the traits and contexts that encourage inclusive or exclusive constructions of group membership and belonging. He appreciates open science practices, interdisciplinary cooperation, experimental design, and lab studies involving face-to-face interactions with in-person participants. You can visit Jesse’s website and get in touch with him here at jessemehravar.com.​
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Olaf Borghi
Doctoral Candidate in Psychology
Olaf investigates how the developing cognition and brain of young people influence how they navigate the political world. On the cognitive side, his research focuses on how young people form and update their political beliefs. On the emotional side, he is particularly interested in how young people feel about the future in times of multiple crises—from climate change to economic instability—and how these feelings affect their political views. Olaf completed his MSc in Psychology at the University of Vienna where, as a research assistant in the Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience Unit, he also gained in-depth experience with the methods and theories from neuroscience. He is now part of the MSCA Doctoral Network “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Adolescence & Democracy” and his current work combines quantitative methods and tools from across the social, developmental, and cognitive sciences, including cognitive tasks, experiments, surveys, and cognitive modelling. His approach is characterised by a strong commitment to open science principles and collaboration across fields. You can learn more about Olaf's work and get in touch with him on his website olafborghi.com.
Irene Arahal
Doctoral Candidate in Political Science
Irene is a political scientist and PhD candidate in Royal Holloway University of London and part of the IP-PAD doctoral network. Her research focuses on the development of political beliefs during the adolescent years. In her thesis, she studies how young citizens construct coherent and stable ideologies and what it means for current young generations to be ideological. She is also interested in the development of political agency and how pervasive harmful stereotypes about young people may deter them from active democratic citizenship. You can find Irene on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irene-arahal-83a38414b/
Ryan Ratnam
Research Assistant
Ryan is interested in how social media and technology affect political values, belief formation, and political behaviour. His previous research has centred on online hateful and extremist communities, especially the manosphere where he mapped and predicted violence. Additionally, he has traced the evolution of various extremist accelerationist communities, applying an intersectional lens which especially emphasises gender and race in radicalisation pathways. Ryan often takes a mixed-methods approach, including specialisms in social network analysis and interviews across political, psychological, and anthropological concepts. He holds an MSc in Social Science of the Internet from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford and has participated in research with Penn State University, UCL, and the Oxford Computational Political Science Group. You can read more about Ryan here.
Past Members
Catherine Moez
Fellow in Political Science
Catherine Moez is interested in political discontentment and disengagement across established democracies. Her work at the Centre has involved audio-based experiments to test reactions to emotional expression in political speech, and computational analyses of political texts and audiovisual recordings of politicians. She completed a political science PhD in 2024 with a dissertation focused on measuring differences between populist and mainstream politicians’ communication styles, including comparisons between different ideological factions of the same party in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. She is interested in the quantitative study of emotion and stylistic or rhetorical elements in speech, and looks forward to continuing this observational research on how politicians speak with experiments (or other causal inference strategies) exploring how the public reacts to certain messages and styles.
Interests: Political discontentment and disengagement; Quantitative text analysis; Audio data analysis; Anti-establishment politics
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Katharina Lawall
Fellow in Political Science, now Lecturer at University of Reading
Katharina is a quantitative social scientist who works on political behaviour, campaigns and gender. She is currently completing her PhD in Political Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. In an era of polarization, voters often strongly dislike one or more political parties. Katharina studies the consequences of these strong feelings of dislike, or negative partisanship, in multi-party systems. What does really disliking a party do to voters? How do parties try to get rid of their “toxic” reputations – and does it work ?
To answer these questions, Katharina uses survey experiments, field experiments and causal inference methods. Katharina has conducted research in the UK, Canada, Germany and Norway, and has experience working with civil society organisations, political parties and campaigns. Her research has been funded by the Berlin Social Science Center, the Canadian Consortium for Electoral Democracy, the Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for Research on Women and Politics at Iowa State University and the LSE US Centre. Previously, Katharina has completed a Master’s degree in European Politics and Society at the University of Oxford (2018, with distinction) and an undergraduate degree at University College London (2016, with distinction).
​Website: https://katharinalawall.com/
Key expertise/research interests: Political Behaviour, Political Psychology, Experiments
Ben Tappin
Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow, now Lecturer at the LSE
Ben received his PhD from the Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway University of London for a thesis that investigated the social and political psychology of belief formation, primarily using experiments both online and in the lab. Following his PhD, he joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a postdoctoral researcher in the Human Cooperation Lab. There he developed lines of research on politically motivated reasoning and the influence of political communication on public opinion, using large-scale experiments, multilevel regression, and meta-analysis.
​At the Centre and over the next three years, Ben will develop his Leverhulme-funded project “Understanding the Power of Political Microtargeting”.
You can visit Ben's website here