Faculty Research Areas

Shannon Brady:  how people (especially students) make meaning of themselves and the life contexts they find themselves in; the consequences of this meaning-making for well-being, achievement, relationships, and health; social-psychological interventions to help people make adaptive meaning and improve these outcomes, especially for people from groups that are socially marginalized or negatively stereotyped.

Merve Balkaya-Ince: dynamic interplay between culture, context, and human development, with a primary focus on the positive development and well-being of ethnic-racial and religious minority youth and their families

Christy M. Buchanan:  development of adolescents, with a particular focus on family influences and family relationships.

William Fleeson:  self-regulation:  what people do, try to do, and are able to do to improve the quality of their lives.

Michael Furr:  personality and social psychology, including the ways that our personality characteristics influence our behavior in social situations

S. Mason Garrison: As a behavior geneticist, quantitative psychologist, and data scientist with a keen interest in diversity science, her work spans multiple disciplines but converges on a central theme: using genetically-informed designs to better understand the causes and consequences of inequity and their relationship with individual differences.

Eranda Jayawickreme: post-traumatic growth as positive personality change, well-being, moral character, and integrative theories of personality.

Janine M. Jennings: understanding cognitive functions, such as attention and memory, in young and older adults, techniques for improving cognition in those experiencing impairments, and methods to enhance classroom learning and study skills.

Lara Kammrath:  self regulation in interpersonal relationships, with a focus on how personality and relationship attitudes predict relationship behaviors in different situations.

Lisa Kiang:  aspects of social development including self and identity development and parent and peer relationships, with a focus on youth from ethnically diverse backgrounds.

E. J. Masicampo:  challenges related to effortful mental processes such as resisting temptations and desires, making difficult decisions, and pursuing and attaining goals.

John V. Petrocelli:  general area of social cognition, with specific interests in perceptions of general and specific events, counterfactual thinking, the role of attitude strength variables in persuasion and resistance processes, and intergroup emotions.

Wayne E. Pratt:  neural mechanisms that underlie how we learn about and respond to the presence of natural rewards, such as highly palatable foods.

Anthony Sali:  behavioral signatures and neural underpinnings of the role of learning in visual attention and cognitive control.

Katharine Scott: How children learn about social groups like race and gender; the consequences of children’s social biases; interventions to reduce race and gender biases starting in early childhood. 

Eric R. Stone:  how people make decisions and how these decisions can be improved.

Christian Waugh:  physiological and neural underpinnings of emotions and adaptation to stress.

(revised:  9/30/24 rk)