Research Areas

Current research in the Identity & Social Relations Lab seeks to address three basic questions: (1) how the understanding, detection, and prevention of negative online interactions, such as cyberbullying, can be facilitated by interdisciplinary collaborations at the intersection of psychology and computer science (e.g., BullyBlocker Project); (2) how social media use and its impact varies as a function of social and group identity; and (3) how research can inform the development of tools for improving well-being in online spaces.

Recent Grants

Interdisciplinary Models to Identify and Understand Cyberbullying. National Science Foundation. January 2021 - December 2024. Role: Yasin Silva (PI), Deborah Hall (Co-PI), and Huan Liu (Co-PI), $499,999.99. (NSF award abstract)

Toward Safer Online Experiences for LGBTQ+ Communities. Grant funded by Google’s Award for Inclusion Research Program. 2022-2023. Role: Co-PI (50%). $60,000.

BullyBlocker: Identifying Cyberbullying in Social Networking Sites. National Science Foundation. September 2017 – August 2020. Role: Yasin Silva (PI) and Deborah Hall (Co-PI), $299,941. (NSF award abstract)

Recent Publications

*denotes student co-author

*Wheeler, B., *Purohit, M., *Furman, P., *Jung, S., Hall, D., Nardini Barioni, M. C., & Silva, Y. (accepted). Global prevalence patterns of anti-Asian prejudice on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic, ASONAM Lecture Notes on Social Networks. (invited submission)

*Tahir, A., Cheng, L., *Sandoval, M., Silva, Y., Hall, D., & Liu, H. (accepted). Evaluating LLMs’ capabilities toward understanding social dynamics. Advances in Social Network Analysis & Mining (ASONAM); 8 pages.

*Sandoval, M, Abuhamad, M., *Furman, P., *Nazari, M., Hall, D., & Silva, Y. (accepted). Identifying cyberbullying roles in social media. Advances in Social Network Analysis & Mining (ASONAM); 8 pages.

*Juarez, M., *Barragan, N., Hall, D., Thiruvathukal, G. K,, & Silva, Y. (2024). ActionPoint App: Implementing an app to combat cyberbullying by strengthening of parent-teen relationships. WWF-PST ’24: Proceedings of the IEEE World Forum on Public Safety Technology; 5 pages.

*Wheeler, B., *Baumel, K., Hall, D. L., & Silva, Y. N. (2023). U.S. parents’ intentions to use anti-bullying apps: Insights from a comprehensive model. Heliyon, 9(9), e19630. (link)

*Wheeler, B., *Jung, S., Hall, D., *Purohit, M., & Silva, Y. (2023). An analysis of temporal trends in anti-Asian hate and counter-hate on Twitter during COVID-19. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 26(7), 535-545. (abstract)

*Wheeler, B., *Jung, S., Nardoni Barioni, M. C., *Purohit, M., Hall, D., & Silva, Y. (2022). Hate is a virus: Understanding the prevalence of anti-Asian prejudice on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic. IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining; 8 pages. Best Paper Award – Multidisciplinary Track

*Cheng, L., *Mosallanezhad, A., Silva, Y., Hall, D. L., & Liu, H. (2022). Bias mitigation for toxicity detection with sequential decisions. ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval, 10 pages, acceptance rate: 20%.

*Hamlett, M., *Powell, G., Silva, Y. N., & Hall, D. L. (2022). A labeled dataset for investigating cyberbullying content patterns in Instagram. AAAI International Conference for Web & Social Media; 8 pages.

Hall, D., Silva, Y., *Wheeler, B., *Cheng, L., & *Baumel, K. (2021). Harnessing the power of interdisciplinary research with psychology-informed cyberbullying detection models. International Journal of Bullying Prevention.

*Schodt, K. B., *Quiroz, S., *Wheeler, B., Hall, D. L., & Silva, Y. N. (2021). Cyberbullying and mental health: The moderating roles of social media use and gender. Frontiers in Psychiatry. (link)

*Shufford, K. N., Hall, D. L., Randall, A. K., *Braunstein, B. M., *O’Brien, M. M., Mickelson, K. D. (2021). Connected while apart: Association between social distancing, computer-mediated communication frequency, and positive affect during COVID-19. Journal of Personal & Social Relationships.

*Baumel, K., *Hamlett, M., *Wheeler, B., Hall, D., Randall, A., & Mickelson, K. (2021). Living through COVID-19: How social distancing and computer-mediated communication impact the lives of LGBQ and heterosexual individuals. Journal of Homosexuality, 68(4):673-691. (abstract)

*Cheng, L., *Mosallanezhad, A., Silva, Y., Hall, D. L., & Liu, H. (2021). Mitigating discrimination in session-based cyberbullying detection. ACL International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing.

*Cheng, L., *Guo, R., Silva, Y. N., Hall, D. L., & Liu, H. (2021). Modeling temporal patterns of cyberbullying with hierarchical attention network. Transactions on Data Science (ACM/IMS Journal).

*Cheng, L.,  Silva, Y. N., Hall, D. L., & Liu, H. (2020). Session-based cyberbullying detection: Problems and challenges. Internet Computing (IEEE Journal).

*Cheng, L., *Shu, K., Wu, S., Silva, Y. N., Hall, D. L., & Liu, H. (2020). Unsupervised cyberbullying detection via time-informed deep clustering. Conference on Information and Knowledge Management CIKM), 10 pages, acceptance rate: 21%.

*Gupta, A., *Yang, W., *Sivakumar, D. P., Silva, Y., Hall, D., & Barioni, M. (2020). Temporal dynamics of cyberbullying on Instagram. ACM CyberSafety: Computational Methods in Online Misbehavior, 8 pages, acceptance rate: 33%. Co-Best Paper Award, CyberSafety 2020

*Grove, R., Hall, D.,*Rubenstein, A., & Terrell, H. (2019). Post-Critical Belief Scale and scripture as predictors of prejudice. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. (pdf)

*Erhart, R.,& Hall, D. L. (2019). A descriptive and comparative analysis of the content of stereotypes about Native Americans. Race & Social Problems. (abstract)

*Cheng, L., *Li, J.,Silva, Y. N., Hall, D. L., & Liu, H. (2019). PI-Bully: Personalized cyberbullying detection with peer influence. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), 7 pages, acceptance rate: 17.9%.

 *Cheng, L., *Guo, R.,Silva, Y. N., Hall, D., & Liu, H. (2019). Hierarchical attention networks for cyberbullying detection on the Instagram social network.The SIAM International Conference on Data Mining, 9 pages, acceptance rate: 22.7%.

*Cheng, L., *Li, J.,Silva, Y. N., Hall, D., & Liu, H. (2019). XBully: Cyberbullying detection within a multi-modal context. ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM), 9 pages, acceptance rate: 16%.

Hall, D. L., *Porter, E., & *Grove, R. C. (2019). Are Muslim ‘costly signals’ Christian warning signs? In D. J. Sloane (Ed.), Empirical studies in the cognitive science of religion (pp. 173-180). London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Lee, J. C., Hall, D. L., & Wood, W. (2018). Experiential or material purchases? Social class determines purchase happiness. Psychological Science, 27(7), 1031-1039. (pdf)

Silva, Y., Hall, D., & *Rich, C. (2018) BullyBlocker: Towards an interdisciplinary approach to identify cyberbullying. Social Network Analysis and Mining. (read online)

Hall, D. L., & *Gonzales, J. P. (2016). Religious group identity and costly signaling. Religion, Brain, & Behavior, 7(3), 246-248.

Burleson, M. H., Hall, D. L., & Gutierres, S. E. (2016). Age moderates contrast effects in women's judgments of facial attractiveness. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 10(3), 179-187. (pdf)

Silva, Y. N., *Rich, C., & Hall, D. (2016). BullyBlocker: Towards the identification of cyberbullying in social networking sites. Extended abstract published in Proceedings of the IEEE / ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM), 1377-1379.

Hall, D. L., Cohen, A. B., *Meyer, K. K., *Varley, A., & Brewer, G. A. (2015). Costly signaling increases trust, even across religious affiliations. Psychological Science, 26(9), 1368-1376. (pdf)

Hall, D. L., Blanton, H., & Prentice (2015). Being much better and no worse that others: Deviance regulation, self-guides, and the motive to be distinct. Self & Identity, 14(2), 214-232. (pdf)

*Byrd, D. T. L., Hall, D. L., Roberts, N. A., & Soto, J. A. (2015). Do politically non-conservative Whites "bend over backwards" to show preferences for Black politicians? Race and Social Problems, 7(3), 227-241. (pdf)