Rate My Professor Yi Shao

Yi Shao, Ph.D., serves as Professor of Psychology and experimental faculty member in the Department of Psychology within the Petree College of Arts and Sciences at Oklahoma City University, a position she has held since 2011. She earned her B.S. from Peking University, followed by an M.A. and Ph.D. from Cornell University. Shao's academic career emphasizes experimental psychology, contributing to both teaching and research in cognitive and developmental domains.

Shao's research specializations encompass developmental processes from a cultural viewpoint, mental time travel, spatial representation, and social psychological phenomena. Her scholarship appears in esteemed journals, with key publications such as "Beyond event valence in mental time travel? The influence of social and achievement events on episodic specificity" published in Memory (2026), "Student age and racial disparities in teachers' discipline evaluations" (2025), "Amplifying Truth? Vocal Volume and Speakers' Self-Presentation Concerns" (2025), "Young Children's Representation of Locations in a Series: Evidence From a Manual Search Task" in Frontiers in Psychology (2020, with Qingfen Hu et al.), "Blindfolded adults' use of geometric cues in haptic-based reorientation" in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (2022, with Ganzhen Feng et al.), and "Children and adults prefer the egocentric representation to the allocentric representation in a rotation task" in Frontiers in Psychology (2018, with Qingfen Hu et al.). Shao has been honored with the John C. Starkey Mentoring in Undergraduate Student Research Award from the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (2019) and the Presidential Faculty & Student Research/Creative Activity Fellowship (2022-2023). Her research on mental time travel and mental health in Native Americans was funded by the Oklahoma City University Faculty Scholarship Fund (2023-2024). As a dedicated mentor, she has guided students in award-winning undergraduate research projects and co-authored publications with them.