Nadezhda Barbashova

Graduate Student

Advisor

Research Area

Cognition, Perception, and Cognitive Neuroscience

Biography

Nadezhda received her bachelor’s degree in Art and Philosophy from the University of Southern California. After graduating, she taught English abroad as a TESOL-certified instructor in Thailand, China, and Germany, where she also coached debate. Nadezhda completed her Master’s degree in Linguistics at the University of Tübingen, where her master’s thesis project was a bilingual decision-making study examining the foreign-language effect—an effect in which people accept more risk when reasoning in a foreign language.

During her time at the University of Tübingen, she worked across a computational linguistics lab, a psycholinguistics lab, and a developmental psycholinguistics lab. Her work included analyzing pitch contours of spoken English, conducting natural language processing analyses, and assisting with both behavioral and EEG research. She also completed a research internship at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, where she assisted with fMRI research on syntactic processing in deaf signers.

Research

I am interested in the facets of emotion that are complex, cognitively rich, and distinctly human. My work focuses on how moral cognition shapes emotional experience, how our ability to evaluate future consequences influences present emotional states, and how both conscious and unconscious emotions can be adaptive in guiding behavior.