Faculty

What I try to focus on in my courses is teaching students how to theorize so that they may play an active role in the development of ideas in whatever career path they choose to follow. Thus, a central part of my teaching is trying to get students to conjecture about which advances we need to make in the theories of a particular content domain. I believe that we also need to focus more attention on teaching students how to apply theories. A major focus in my courses is trying to teach students how we can use the various theories discussed in class to address practice issues.

I have three primary research foci: media psychology, attitudes and persuasion, and health communication. My research on media psychology primarily focuses on the processes involved in comprehending media messages, though I conduct research on a wide variety of topics related to the media including prosocial effects of playing violent video games, racism and the media, romantic media and conceptions of romance, product placements, and the interaction between the media and culture. My research on persuasion is largely concerned with attitude and norm accessibility. Accessibility refers to the ease by which something is activated from memory or comes to mind. For example, you attitude toward cockroaches probably comes to mind relatively easily (“Yuch!!!”) when you see a cockroach which suggests the attitude is very accessible from memory. Attitudes and norms that are more accessible from memory are more predictive of a person’s behavior. Within the area of health psychology, my research focuses on the influence of attitudes and norms on people’s health related behaviors (particularly smoking and substance abuse). In addition, I am interested in how people respond to health related messages.