Hannah Kramer headshot.

Hannah J. Kramer

she/her/hers

Assistant Professor of Psychology

PhD, University of California-Davis, 2021

Office Hours: By appointment

Research Overview

Professor Kramer will be accepting applications for graduate students for the 2026-2027 academic year.

I am broadly interested in how children and adults figure out what other people are thinking and feeling. In this work, I take context seriously: That is, not only how social structures shape people’s reasoning, but also how children and adults incorporate contextual features into their beliefs about people. I have conducted three lines of work on children’s and adults’ (1) beliefs about time as integral to mental states, (2) use of the past in their emotion predictions, and (3) erroneous reliance on social groups when reasoning about people.

Selected Publications

  • Kramer, H. J., Lara, K. H., Gweon, H., Zaki, J., Miramontes, M., and Lagattuta, K.H. (2024). This too shall pass, but when? Children’s and adults’ beliefs about the time duration of emotions, desires, and preferences. Child Development, 95, 1299-1314. doi: 10.1111/cdev.14072
  • Weisman, K., Ghossainy, M. E., Williams, A. J., Payir, A., Lesage, K. A., Reyes-Jaquez, B., Amin, T. G., Anggoro, F. K., Burdett, E. R. R., Chen, E. E., Coetzee, L., Coley, J. D., Dahl, A., Dautel, J. B., Davis, H. E., Davis, E. L., Diesendruck, G., Evans, D., Feeney, A., Gurven, M., Jee, B. D., Kramer, H. J., Kushnir, T., McAuliffe, K., McLaughlin, A., Nichols, S., Rockers, P. C., Shneidman, L., Srinivasan, M., Tarullo, A. R., Taylor, L, K., Yu, Y., Yucel, M., Zhao, X., Corriveau, K. H., Richert, R. A., and (2024). The development and diversity of religious cognition and behavior: Protocol for Wave 1 data collection with children and parents by the Developing Belief Network. PLOS ONE, 19, e0292755
  • Kramer, H. J., Parra, L. A., Lara, K. H., Hastings, P. D., and Lagattuta, K. H. (2022). Consistency among social groups in judging emotions across time. Emotion, 22, 880-893. doi: 10.1037/emo0000836
  • Kramer, H. J., Goldfarb, D., Tashjian, S. M., and Lagattuta, K. H. (2021). Dichotomous thinking about social groups: Learning about one group can activate opposite beliefs about another group. Cognitive Psychology, 129, 101408. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2021.101408
  • Lagattuta, K. H., and Kramer, H. J. (2021). Advanced emotion understanding: Children’s and adults’ knowledge that minds generalize from prior emotion events. Emotion, 21, 1-16. doi: 10.1037/emo0000694
  • Lara, K. H., Lagattuta, K. H., and Kramer, H. J. (2019). Is there a downside to anticipating the upside? Children’s and adults’ reasoning about how prior expectations shape future emotions. Child Development, 90, 1170-1184. doi: 10.1111/cdev.12994
  • Goldfarb, D., Lagattuta, K. H., Kramer, H. J., Kennedy, K., and Tashjian, S. M. (2017). When your kind cannot live here: How generic language and criminal sanctions shape social categorization. Psychological Science, 28, 1597-1609. doi: 10.1177/0956797617714827