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Pelin Kesebir
Pelin Kesebir
Honorary Fellow, Former Assistant Scientist, Center for Healthy Minds

Pelin is a social psychologist interested in the study of happiness and virtue. The ultimate goal of her research is to gain insights into the bidirectional relationship between virtue and happiness while discovering ways to encourage virtuous cycles in people.

She's also interested in existential psychology, and particularly in how the human awareness of mortality affects various psychological dynamics. Combining positive psychology and existential psychology, Pelin studies the ways in which virtue can buffer the destructive effects of death anxiety.

Her work so far has focused on the role of self-transcendent virtues such as humility in mollifying anxiety and fostering existential well-being. Most recently, she was working on developing implicit, indirect measures for virtues, which can then be used to assess the effectiveness of well-being interventions.

Recent Publications

Education

B.A.International Relations, B.A. Psychology, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey, 2002

Ph.D., Social Psychology and Personality, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009

Links

Related Studies

Healthy Minds @ Work Demo

Developing a Program to Learn and Measure Well-Being at Scale

In collaboration with Healthy Minds Innovations, this project strives to learn how to teach and measure well-being to scale

Photo of Tibetan singing bowl by bkkm via iStock

Mapping the Interface between Meditation and Neuroscience

Center researchers and collaborators are building new approaches to understand the links between traditional contemplative perspectives and scientific theory to better study the scientific effects of meditation training on the brain, body, mind and behavior.

Smiling Faces Study

Smiling Faces Task and Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Following up with past research participants about the pandemic's impact on their lives and their current psychological outlook.