Oscar Ybarra
BIO
Research deals with how people make decisions about their social surroundings and navigate their web of interactions with known and trusted others (friends, family) and those who they may not know and even dislike (strangers, outgroup members).
Research programs fall along four lines, and the common denominator is that the social relates strongly to the cognitive. I study how people understand and make decisions about the social aspects of the world versus those related to tasks and work, how people make decisions about others and the cognitive biases that may preclude creating social connections, how social interaction and relationships support and enhance cognitive abilities and performance, and how the cognitively stimulating nature of social interaction is affected by trust, asynchrony, and inauthenticity in ones approach to others.
- Oscar Ybarra, Todd Chan. 2026. What happens at home stays at home: the Vegas rule for work depends on working memory. Community, Work & Family 29(1):101-122 .
- Savannah Adams, Oscar Ybarra. 2026. Separate and unequal: Moral domains differ in corresponding social judgments of others. PLOS ONE 21(1):e0338026.
- Qing Yang, Yicheng Wang, Oscar Ybarra. 2026. Materialism amid uncertainty: how intolerance of uncertainty shapes value shifts before and during the pandemic. The Journal of Social Psychology
- Oscar Ybarra, Chan, Todd. 2025. Personal agency and social connection are associated with loneliness over time. Communications Psychology 3(1):1-9.
- Oscar Ybarra, Kimberly Rios, Matthew C. Keller, Nicholas Michalak, Todd Chan. 2024. On Predicting and Being Predicted: Navigating Life in a Competitive Landscape Full of Mind Readers. The Oxford Handbook of the Psychology of Competition :350-372.
- Oscar Ybarra, Chan, Todd. 2023. The S(quad) Model, a Pattern Approach for Understanding the Individual and their Social Network Relations: Application to Loneliness. Frontiers in Social Psychology 1:1278671.
- Ybarra, Oscar, Yang, Qing , Van den Bos, Kees , Zhao, Yufang , Guan, Lili , Cao, Yunfei , Li, Fang , Huang, Xiting . 2019. Neurophysiological and behavioral evidence that self-uncertainty salience increases self-esteem striving. Biological Psychology 143:62-73.
- Kross, Ethan F, Ybarra, Oscar, Verduyn, Philippe , Boyer, Margaret , Drake, Brittany , Gainsburg, Izzy , Vickers, Brian , Jonides, John . 2019. Does counting emotion words on online social networks provide a window into people's subjective experience of emotion? A case study on Facebook. Emotion 19(1):97-107.
- Ybarra, Oscar, Kross, Ethan F, Lee, David S, Orvell, Ariana , Briskin, Julia , Shrapnell, Taylor , Gelman, Susan A, Ayduk, Ozlem . 2019. When chatting about negative experiences helps-and when it hurts: Distinguishing adaptive versus maladaptive social support in computer-mediated communication. Emotion :No-Pagination Specified-No Pagination Specified.
- Ybarra, Oscar, Chan, Todd , Michalak, Nicholas M. 2019. When God is your only friend: Religious beliefs compensate for purpose in life in the socially disconnected. Journal of Personality 87(3):455-471.