Alexandra Paxton

Assistant Professor

Psychological Sciences

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Education

Ph.D., Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced (2015)

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Lab Websites

Dyscord Lab

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Research Interests

• Communication and social interaction as a complex dynamical system (including movement, language, attention, and emotion)
• Data-rich and dynamics-focused research methods and analyses
• Naturally occurring datasets and “big data” for psychological theory-building
• Ethics of human-derived data

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Research Synopsis

My work focuses on improving our understanding of communication and interaction with a data-rich and complex-systems approach. I’m particularly interested in how context changes behavior.

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Teaching

Undergraduate

• PSYC 1100

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Publications

Recent

Müller-Frommeyer, L. C., Kauffeld, S., & Paxton, A. (2020). Beyond consistency: Contextual dependency of language style in monolog and conversation. Cognitive Science, 44(4). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cogs.12834

Pouw, W., Paxton, A., Harrison, S. J., & Dixon, J. A. (2020). Acoustic information about upper limb movement in voicing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(21), 11364-11367. https://www.pnas.org/content/117/21/11364

Duran, N., Paxton, A., & Fusaroli, R. (2019). ALIGN: Analyzing Linguistic Interactions with Generalizable techniques. Psychological Methods, 24(4), 419-438. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30816726/

Paxton, A., & Tullett, A. (2019). Open science in data-intensive psychology and cognitive science. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 6(1), 47-55. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2372732218790283

Representative

Paxton, A., & Dale, R. (2013). Argument disrupts interpersonal synchrony. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66(11), 2092-2102.

Paxton, A., & Dale, R. (2017). Interpersonal movement coordination responds to high- and low-level conversational constraints. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1135.

Main, A., Paxton, A., & Dale, R. (2016). An exploratory analysis of dynamic emotion regulation between mothers and adolescents during conflict discussions. Emotion, 16(6), 913-928.

Paxton, A., & Griffiths, T. L. (2017). Finding the traces of behavior and cognition in big data and naturally occurring datasets. Behavior Research Methods, 49(5), 1630-1638.

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Professional Activities

• Academic editor, PLOS ONE
• Handling editor, Cognitive Processing
• Consulting editor, Behavior Research Methods
• President, Society for Computation in Psychology