Aleksandra Piejka

Aleksandra Piejka is a psychologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, specializing in the psychophysiology of loneliness and social connection. Her work focuses on how relating to others registers in the body, aiming to understand what physiological measures can tell us about social experience and where they fall short. She earned her PhD at the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, focusing on social cognition and parasympathetic activity in loneliness. She is particularly interested in social experience as a dynamic system, tracking how emotional and physiological states unfold and vary over time, and uses ambulatory physiological measurement, experience sampling, and immersive VR in her work.