I was born in Miami, Florida to an Ecuadorian-American mother and Ecuadorian father. Throughout my life, I lived in several countries including Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. From this early experience, I became really interested in understanding how culture influences us.
As an undergraduate student at Pomona College, I became fascinated by how culture influences the brain. I investigated differences between Latinx and European Americans in spontaneous trait inferences using EEG with Dr. Richard S. Lewis. I also ran a study in Ecuador to understand how culture influences academic performance. This experience reinforced the commitment I have to integrate psychology and neuroscience to study Latin Americans, a group that is understudied in the current cultural psychology literature.
After graduation, I came to Michigan where I worked with Dr. Shinobu Kitayama on a variety of projects. In some of our first projects, we collaborated with Dr. Michele Gelfand, and Dr. Josh Ackerman to understand under what conditions people become more sensitive to norms. Simultaneously, I began some projects on the self. These lines of work have since developed into interdisciplinary research in psychology and neuroscience exploring two crucial domains in social psychology: the self and social norms. I recently expanded this work to understand how relational norms predict the spread of COVID-19.
As I was conducting the research on the self and norms, I was also thinking of ways to pursue my initial interest: the study of Latin Americans in cultural psychology. I have been working on a comprehensive analysis of implicit interdependence in Latin America and found that unlike the East Asian form of interdependence, the Latin American form is emotionally expressive. This early work turned into a larger project with Dr. Krishna Savani, and Dr. Alvaro San Martin to understand how interdependence manifests differently across the world. Check out the project!
As an Assistant Professor at Duke University, I hope to expand my work on Norms, the Self, and Interdependence in Latin America. If you are interested in my work and would like to connect please email me (csalvad@umich.edu).