My research focuses generally on three interrelated areas: help-seeking, the self, and personal relationships.
Students who are interested in this can apply to work as a research assistant running participants, analyzing data, and collaborating on writing up results for presentations and papers.
Help-Seeking
There are lots of different factors that encourage help-seeking behaviors, such as being distressed, being ready to change, taking a compassionate stance toward themselves, prioritizing values like tolerance and social justice, believing that therapy is beneficial, and being confident they can “do well” in therapy.
In contrast, research has shown that some factors tend to be barriers, such as holding stigmatizing views about therapy, prioritizing materialistic values, holding onto traditionally masculine gender norms, and believing that therapy would threaten a person’s self-esteem.
The Self
There are several different processes that influence who a person is and what that person does: personal values, life-goals, narcissism, self-compassion, self-efficacy, self-affirmation, self-esteem, mindfulness, rumination, stigma, career interests, social media use, psychological distress, empathy…phew, that’s just some of them.
One theory that is interesting to me is self-affirmation theory (Sherman & Cohen, 2006; Steele, 1988). According to this theory, people are motivated to maintain a positive view of who they are, but threats (anything from a strange look, or a microaggression, or a bad grade on an exam) can challenge these positive views. One way that people maintain their positive self-worth is by reflecting on important, positive aspects of their identity. This act of reminding one’s self of positive and important aspects of one’s self is called self-affirmation, and it can happen in a research lab (i.e., experimentally manipulated), or it can occur more naturally in everyday life. Self-affirmation is linked to all sorts of different outcomes (usually positive, but not always), and has been shown to reduce peoples’ tendency to respond to “threatening” information in defensive ways.
Relationships
People are made to be in relationships, and it’s no surprise that relationships can be the cause and the effect of numerous different psychological issues.
In this lab, we’ve looked at different predictors of relationship satisfaction and stability, but we’ve also looked at how relationship education (curricula that teach communication and relationship skills) affect relationships and mental health.
For downloadable copies of my peer-reviewed journal articles on these topics, please visit my page on Researchgate.