An NYUAD Psychology Professor is working to preserve UAE’s history as remembered by the women who lived it.  

Interviewing Emirati grandmothers, their children, and their grandchildren, Maass and her collaborator, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Zayed University Christin Camia, hope the interviews will paint a picture of life in the UAE before the oil boom.

“We find the younger generation has often misguided ideas of what life was like for past generations,” Maass said. “For example, many students project their experiences into the past, thinking that their grandparents led somewhat similar lives to nowadays.” Therefore, we are recording memories of daily life as it was before and during the transition.”

“How did you celebrate important cultural events? When did you realize things were changing and how did you and people around you react to it?  Can you tell me a funny event from your life? Very simple questions on lifestyle and life events,” Maass added. “Right now, the students have unrealistic ideas of what it was like. So, we hope to preserve that memory that would otherwise get lost.”

Maass said the project will take quite a bit of time to complete. Ultimately, the work is expected to produce a collection of historical oral narratives that will also be assembled into a book.  

“I’m getting attached to this country,” said Maass, who’s been living and working in the UAE since the Fall of 2022. “I always feel that, as a scientist, I should give something back to the country that hosts me and where I’m welcome.”

This project also looks at how family stories are passed down through generations. By interviewing the daughters and granddaughters of the elderly women involved, scientists seek to understand how the history of the UAE is kept alive. Maass said this was important because, with the UAE changing quickly, preserving these stories helps maintain cultural identity and understanding across generations.

Maass draws some of her inspiration and passion for this project from her personal life. She learned much about her own country’s history from her grandmother while growing up in post-World War II Germany. Maass said after the War, Germany forbade teaching its present-day history because the country was afraid the teachers who were raised during the Nazi regime would carry on that ideology.

“My grandmother was a really important source of information on how intergroup relations and discrimination developed in time,” Maass said. “We talked for hours and hours about it. I tried to discover what went wrong, why, and what happened. That motivated me to understand intergroup relations and phenomena like discrimination.”

Those early conversations would inspire Maass’s life’s work. She became interested in prejudices and stereotyping, which led her to study the relationship between language and how we form impressions of others.

How does language affect the way we think? This question is central to most of Maass’ research. Since arriving at NYUAD, she is particularly interested in understanding how humans integrate different types of information when engaging in conversations. When we listen to a speaker, we gather the substance of what is being said, but according to Maass, we also pick up a lot of social information from voice (such as gender and age). How these pieces of information are integrated in people’s minds is what Maass and her lab are currently investigating in collaboration with sociolinguist and cognitive neuroscientist, Jen Lewendon.