LaCount “JJ” Togans | Photo by Adam Atkinson
What I study and why: My scholarship investigates the cognitive, affective, and behavioral consequences of feeling ambivalent and internally conflicted (e.g., guilty pleasures, nostalgia). Although our attitudes and emotions are extremely useful for navigating our social worlds, our opinions and feelings are often not black-and-white or point solely in one direction (i.e., positive or negative), resulting in internal conflict—what is the right thing to do, feel, or believe when we can see more than one side of an issue? Within this space, my current research focuses on examining the psychology of guilty pleasures, as guilty pleasures offer the perfect testbed for understanding how people wrestle with ambivalence and mixed emotions (i.e., “Why do I like something that I, or others, see as weird or counternormative?”).
This fall, I am teaching: PSYC 327: Social Psychology II and PSYC 219: Cross-cultural Psychology
What students can expect from me: I view social psychology as “the psychology of everyday life.” To that end, I aim to make my courses fun and engaging by imbuing lectures with recent real world events, pop culture media (e.g., music, TV, video games), and interactive discussion. Accordingly, I want to guide students to make those same connections with course content and their own day-to-day experiences to highlight how what we’re discussing in the classroom relates to their own lives.
Getting to know me: Outside of the lab and classroom, I spend most of my time cooking and baking, dancing (badly), watching nostalgic commercial reels from the late 90s and 2000s, and playing video games. Regarding gaming, from 2008-2019 I was a competitive video game player specializing in Super Smash Bros. In fact, my best-ever tournament performance was an event that took place in Easton in 2015, wherein I placed 17th out of 200 players and my training partner placed ninth.
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