Degrees
PhD, Educational Psychology
MA, Educational Psychology
BA, English Literature
Research Interests
Human flourishing across the lifespan, positive relationships and love, longitudinal analysis, social network analysis, Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA)
Classes taught:
Positive Relationships Across the Lifespan,
Positive Education,
Science of Human Flourishing (transdisciplinary course),
Longitudinal Methods,
Emotions
Contact and CV
about me:
Saida Heshmati is an assistant professor of psychology in the Division of Behavioral & Organizational Sciences at Claremont Graduate University. She is a positive developmental psychologist interested in how optimal development unfolds over time in diverse samples, especially in at-risk adults. Using her expertise in positive relationships and love, positive education, human development, and state-of-the-art analytical methods, she examines authentic or embedded assessments of large datasets related to individual and group characteristics that influence everyday well-being and positive development. Her work has brought together a suite of measurement tools such as experience sampling methods, observational analysis, cognitive psychometric modeling, and wearable physiology monitors in the service of understanding how individuals’ sense of well-being unfolds moment-to-moment in their everyday lives.
One focus of her research involves health and well-being promotion across the lifespan through the development of inexpensive and accessible positive psychology and contemplative programs, supported by smartphone technology. Particularly, she is interested in enhancing young adults’ ability to adjust to the demands of life while flourishing during this process. In her research, she tests the deployment of mindfulness and positive psychology practices to develop the skills of mindful awareness and dispositions that lead toward flourishing in adults. To this end, she conducts Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) studies to collect intensive data on adults’ emotional and cognitive evaluations of their daily life using smartphones. As a result of these studies, she and her research team have developed an EMA-adapted well-being measure of momentary experiences of well-being based on Seligman’s PERMA.
The second area of her research program focuses on exploring innovative, reliable, and valid measures that can be used at scale in the social sciences, and to reframe these methods in a way that can be used to advance the science of positive psychology. To this end, she uses novel methodological approaches such as social network analysis, multilevel modeling for repeated measures, and dynamical systems modeling in the Bayesian framework to map ‘optimal development’ over time in diverse samples. For example, she sought out a cognitive psychometric approach, called Cultural Consensus Theory (CCT), and adapted it to social and relationship sciences. This formulation of CCT uses a hierarchical Bayesian modeling approach, making it possible to derive a population-level consensus while accounting for individual differences among participants. This method has enormous potential implications for examining the impact of cultural beliefs on flourishing and its impact on well-being. For instance, in her research on daily well-being, CCT has proven to be useful to learn about positive relationships and what makes people feel loved in everyday life contexts. She has recently expanded this program of research in positive relationships to understand various aspects of love beyond romantic love, with a specific emphasis on the positive effects of love in daily life.
