Recent News

I will be giving a talk at the upcoming Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) conference in January 2010. I will be speaking on the panel "The Two Faces of Verbal Mimicry: Does Linguistic Synchrony Predict Positive or Negative Social Outcomes?" Chaired by Matt L. Newman and Marlone D. Henderson. The title of my talk is "Trust through Text: Examining Linguistic Similarity and Trust in Text Chat".

Bio

I am a 3rd year Ph.D. student in the Media, Technology & Society program, in the School of Communication, at Northwestern University. I am part of the CollaboLab: The Laboratory for Understanding Collaborative Technology, headed by Darren Gergle (who is also my advisor). I am also affiliated with Northwestern's Center for Technology and Social Behavior.

Research Interests

My primary research interests lie at the intersection between technology-mediated communication and interpersonal relationships. I am interested in topics such as trust formation in computer-mediated communication, interpersonal attraction in technology-mediated settings, and how people manage their close relationships using technologies such as e-mail, SMS text-messaging, and social network sites such as Facebook.

Research Experience

During my undergraduate studies (also at Northwestern University) I worked with Eli Finkel (department of psychology) on a thesis about forgiveness tendencies for individuals in romantic relationships. I also worked with Allan Schnaiberg (department of sociology) on a thesis about college student's use of Instant Messenger to navigate their social and romantic relationships.

I also was a research intern in the summer of 2007 at the Pew Internet & American Life Project, part of the Pew Research Center. Please see my CV for a full list of research experiences.

Publications

Scissors, L.E., Geraghty, K., Gill, A.J, and Gergle, D. (2009). In CMC We Trust: The Role of Similarity. In Proceedings of CHI 2009. New York: ACM Press.

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Scissors, L.E., Gill, A.J, and Gergle, D. (2008). Linguistic Mimicry and Trust in Text-Based CMC. In Proceedings of CSCW 2008. New York: ACM Press.

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Finkel, E. J., Burnette, J. L., & Scissors, L. E. (2007). Vengefully ever after: Destiny beliefs, state attachment anxiety, and forgiveness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 871-886.

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Contact Information

email: l-scissors[at]northwestern.edu

CV

You can download a copy of my CV here (coming soon).