My main areas of research are:

(1) Health Communication: social influence, social marketing, peer influence, graphic media images.

(2) Health and Well-Being: relationship between polical attitudes, media consumption and emotional well-being.

(3) Research Methodology: attitude measurement, implicit psychometrics, ethics in science and communication.

(4) Social Cognition: social comparison and categorization, unconscious processes, meta-cognition (overconfidence and judgments of learning).

(5) Motivated Cognition: cognitive dissonance, comparative evaluations.

Most recent research:

In current work, I have become interested in what I jokingly refer to as "negative psychology." Whereas many ("positive psychology") researchers have helped us better understanding the psychological factors that lead to resilience and promote well-being in the face of stress, I have begun focusing my attention on the variables that lead to the very stressers we all must try to overcome. I am particularly interested in broader social structural variables that raise societal levels of anger, anxiety, depression and pessimism and the psychophysiological pathways by which these variables affect morbidity and mortality rates. This new line has two arms. One seeks to link epidemiological and health data to social structural archives. Another utilizes laboratory experimental methods to examine psychophysiological mechanisms that might underlie observed trends.