I am a cognitive psychologist, specializing in judgment and decision making research.  More specifically, I am interested in affective forecasting, which looks at people’s attempts to predict how happy they would be in some situation.  These judgments influence many of our choices and behaviors, as we generally select the things that we expect to make us happier, either in the short-run or the long-run.  However, these judgments are often wrong, and my research aims to understand why we make these mistakes and how these errors in judgment affect us.  In particular, I’m interested in the happiness judgments people make about aging and health.

Education:

Post-doctoral Research Fellowship, VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System 
Ph.D., University of Michigan
M.A., University of Michigan
B.A., California State University Hayward (East Bay)

Selected Publications & Presentations:

Polk, T.A., Lacey, H.P., Nelson, J.K., Demiralp, E., Newman, L.I., Krauss, D., Raheja, A. & Farah, M.J. (In Press). The development of abstract letter representations for reading: Evidence for the role of context. Cognitive Neuropsychology.

Lacey, H.P., Fagerlin, A., Loewenstein, G., Smith, D., Riis, J. & Ubel, P.A. (2008). Are they really that happy? Exploring scale recalibration in estimates of well-being. Health Psychology, 27 (6), 669-675.

Zikmund-Fisher, B.J., Lacey, H.P., & Fagerlin, A. (2008).  The potential impact of decision role and patient age on end of life treatment decision making.  Journal of Medical Ethics, (34) 327-331.

Lacey, H.P., Smith, D.M., & Ubel, P.A. (2006).  Hope I die before I get old: Mispredicting happiness across the lifespan.  Journal of Happiness Studies, 7(2), 167-182.

Lacey, H.P. Fagerlin, A., Smith, D., Loewenstein, G., Riis, J. & Ubel, P.A. (2006).  It must be awful for them: Healthy people overlook disease variability in quality of life judgments. Judgment and Decision Making, 1(2), 146-152.

Courses:
Introduction to Psychology
Cognitive Psychology
Positive Psychology
Research Methods in Psychology
Honors: Core Concepts in Psychology