Nazanin Kafaee (she/her)

LIFE Fellow since 2026, University of Michigan

I am a social/personality PhD candidate at the University of Michigan working with Robin Edelstein. I am broadly interested in how individual differences, such as physiology and personality, interact with social, cultural, and historical contexts to shape people’s close relationships and sexual experiences. In my research, I use experimental, psychometric, qualitative, and computational methods to examine topics such as hormonal covariation between partners in response to environmental stressors, the effects of social movements on interpersonal relationships, and the measurement of sexual personality. I also use natural language processing to examine historical changes in sexual attitudes and the moralization of women’s sexuality, as well as cross-cultural understandings of love. Moving forward, I aim to incorporate a lifespan developmental perspective into my work to better understand how individual differences, close relationships and sexual experiences develop across the life course and within changing sociocultural contexts.

Publications

From, A., Diamond, E., Kafaee, N., Reynaga, M., Edelstein, R. S., & Gordon, A. M. (2025). Does similarity matter? A scoping review of perceived and actual similarity in romantic couples. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 42(10), 2780–2802. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075251349720