Geraldine Downey

Geraldine Downey is the Robert Johnston Niven Professor of Humane Letters in Psychology and director of the Center for Justice, both at Columbia University. 

Downey's primary interest is the study of personal and status-based rejection. In her current work, she is investigating people's expectations of rejection and their impact on the perception of other people's behavior, in anticipation of and following social encounters. Her work has focused on the personality disposition of rejection sensitivity (RS) and on its association with responses to rejection as well as efforts made to prevent it. This line of work has led her to study sensitivity to rejection based on personal, unique characteristics, as well as sensitivity to rejection based on group characteristics such as race and gender. She has sought to investigate the effect of rejection sensitivity on people's behavior by utilizing various techniques, including established social cognition paradigms, experimental studies, physiological recordings, brain imaging, and diary studies. Recently, Downey has been using the knowledge acquired from her research on rejection to develop models of personality and attachment disorders. She is also interested in the study of identity, focusing on how individuals use their multiple social identities strategically to cope with daily stressors.

Geraldine Downey is a member of the Presidential Scholars in Society and Neuroscience Advisory Committee.