Maliki Ghossainy
Senior Research Scientist
Dr. Maliki Eyvonne Ghossainy is a senior research scientist at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. A psychological scientist and statistician, she integrates social, cognitive, cultural, and biological mechanisms into a model of belief formation across the early childhood years. Using mixed-methods designs, Dr. Ghossainy studies the sophisticated ways in which children judiciously evaluate different sources of information. Dr. Ghossainy’s research emphasizes the importance of studying children’s cognition in context, and her recent studies investigate the role of linguistic input in the epistemic judgments of multilingual children.
Dr. Ghossainy was one of five students to be selected as a Graduate Fellow in Statistics at UT Austin in 2014. In addition to being an experienced researcher, she is also an active statistical consultant and has worked with clients from a variety of fields (e.g., academic and nonacademic settings, private and public sectors) to design surveys, analyze data, offer technical trainings, and report findings to relevant stakeholders.
Recent News
Education
PhD, Psychology, University of Texas at Austin
MSc, Statistics and Data Science, University of Texas at Austin
Selected Publications
Ghossainy, M. E., Al-Shawaf, L., & Woolley, J. D. (2021). Epistemic Vigilance in Early Ontogeny: Children’s Use of Nonverbal Behavior to Detect Deception. Evolutionary Psychology, 19(1), 147470492098686. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474704920986860
Al-Shawaf, L., Lewis, D. M., Ghossainy, M. E., & Buss, D. M. (2019). Experimentally inducing disgust reduces desire for short-term mating. Evolutionary Psychological Science, 5(3), 267-275.
Woolley, J. D., & E. Ghossainy, M. (2013). Revisiting the Fantasy-Reality Distinction: Children as Naïve Skeptics. Child Development, 84(5), 1496–1510. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12081