Degrees
PhD, Educational Psychology
MA, Educational Psychology
BA, English Literature
Research Interests
Lifespan health and resilient development, Social connection and interpersonal processes, Intensive longitudinal methods, social network analysis, Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA), Ambulatory assessment
Classes taught:
Emotion,
Cultural & Cross-Cultural Concepts & Methods,
Multilevel Modeling,
Longitudinal Methods,
Social Network Analysis
Contact and CV
about me:
Saida Heshmati is an associate professor of psychology in the Division of Behavioral & Organizational Sciences at Claremont Graduate University. She is a developmental psychologist interested in how adaptive psychosocial development unfolds over time in diverse samples, especially in at-risk adults. Using her expertise in social connection and interpersonal processes, human development, and state-of-the-art analytical methods, she examines authentic or embedded assessments of large datasets related to individual and group characteristics that influence daily psychosocial functioning and adaptive development. Her work integrates a multimodal biobehavioral assessment platform, including ecological momentary assessment, observational analysis, cognitive psychometric modeling, and ambulatory physiological monitoring, to characterize how individuals' psychosocial functioning varies dynamically across naturalistic daily contexts.
One focus of her research involves health and well-being promotion across the lifespan through the development of inexpensive and accessible positive psychology and contemplative programs, supported by smartphone technology. Particularly, she is interested in enhancing young adults’ ability to adjust to the demands of life while flourishing during this process. In her research, she tests the deployment of stress-regulatory and resilience-focused practices to develop the skills of self-regulatory capacities and adaptive dispositions. To this end, she conducts Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) studies to collect intensive data on adults’ emotional and cognitive evaluations of their daily life using smartphones. As a result of these studies, she and her research team have developed an EMA-adapted well-being measure of momentary experiences of well-being.
The second area of her research program focuses on developing psychometrically rigorous and scalable assessment tools for population-level research, and reframing these approaches to advance a precision science of psychosocial health and resilience. To this end, she uses novel methodological approaches such as social network analysis, multilevel modeling for repeated measures, and dynamical systems modeling in the Bayesian framework to map ‘optimal development’ over time in diverse samples. For example, she sought out a cognitive psychometric approach, called Cultural Consensus Theory (CCT), and adapted it to social and relationship sciences. This formulation of CCT uses a hierarchical Bayesian modeling approach, making it possible to derive a population-level consensus while accounting for individual differences among participants. This method has enormous potential implications for examining the impact of cultural beliefs on psychosocial resilience and well-being. For instance, in her research on daily well-being, CCT has proven to be useful to learn about social connection and interpersonal processes in everyday life contexts. She has recently expanded this program of research to understand various aspects of social connection beyond romantic love, with a specific emphasis on the positive effects of interpersonal processes on health promotion and psychosocial resilience in daily life.
